Half-baked Orwell.
A ramshackle circus troupe attempts to rescue its imprisoned ringleader in this political farce/allegory.
Horowitz’s prior fictional works have been collaborations, including the novel The New World (2015) with Chris Adrian and the ambitious book app The Silent History (2014) with Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett. An extra set of hands might have improved this thin and only intermittently funny tale of wrongful arrest and totalitarian regimes. As the story opens in an imaginary country, circus leader Zloty Kornblatt has been arrested by a strike team and accused of illegal performances that stoked “mockery, destabilization, and anarchy.” While he stews in a “Confinement Needle” and awaits a kangaroo court’s verdict in a neighboring and more conservative province, circus member Flora helps plot a rescue, but her cohorts are unpromising saviors: husband-and-wife performers are at each other’s throats, and the strongman only wants to deliver imitation feats of strength according to “Continental mime theory.” The novel alternates between Flora’s voice—earnest, adventure-seeking—and that of a lackey for the regime holding Zloty—bureaucratic, propagandistic—which helps underscore Horowitz’s point about the virtues of independence, however scruffily acquired. But tonally, the novel never successfully settles into the satiric tone it aspires to, leaning heavily on quirky coinages (“smokepoot,” “tedfruit,” “Harmimal,” and the “Pickle Index” itself, a kind of collection of good-hearted folklore), while the plot turns as the circus infiltrates the needle are threadbare disguises, suddenly handy escape hatches, etc. It gives nothing away to say that the novel stands for the power of a small committed team to overwhelm the bad guys and challenge the way rebels are persecuted for public entertainment. But its plot and prose are too limp to sell the point. “Nonsense had gotten us this far,” Flora enthuses, as their plot comes together. But nonsense only goes so far.
Half-baked Orwell.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-53581-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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