Insights that seem too easily won in a slick story that skims the surface.
Another installment in the life of preternaturally wise military brat Katie Nash (Joy School, 1997, etc.), who over a summer and fall learns about friendship and love: a story that’s more well-intentioned manual of life-lessons than engaging drama of adolescent turbulence.
Katie, now 13 and living in St. Louis, misses her former home, Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas, where her mother died and her best friend Cherylanne lives. Dad, who had a rough childhood, is still playing the heavy, but stepmother Ginger, a model of tact and insight, seems to be softening him up. Katie’s only friend is Cynthia O’ Connell, a loser though she does share Katie’s liking for poetry—but also has a pathetic mother determined to start a Girl Scout troop (afraid of the outdoors, she plans overnight camping in her living room). As summer begins, Dad insists that Katie work two jobs: helping old Mr. Randolph, a retired teacher, with his bedridden wife; and babysitting the three Wexler boys. Not Katie’s ideal jobs, but she buckles under and finds them more rewarding than she expected. Mr. and Mrs. Randolph are still deeply in love, though they’ve been married for eons, and Katie learns that “In some couples, each puts the other first.” Not like the Wexlers, whose boys are fun to babysit once Katie figures out that they like playing games, but whose marriage nearly ends that summer. A trip back to see Cherylanne affords more life-lessons—that Cherylanne isn’t as smart as Cynthia, that she doesn’t appreciate poetry, and that friendships change. Cherylanne has troubles too—she’s pregnant and must get married. In the fall, Katie, now attending a snobby private school, is mean to Cynthia. But she really wants to be good, confesses her sins to a friendly priest, and, realizing how much she values Cynthia’s friendship, tries to win her back.
Insights that seem too easily won in a slick story that skims the surface.Pub Date: June 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-1134-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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