A southern incest survivor struggles to find her way in love and work in this second from Vaughn (Many Things Have Happened Since he Died and Here Are the Highlights, 1990): a gritty chronicle whose honest passion makes up for an admittedly tired premise. Sylvia Mullins has been through too much for her 23 years. Before her birth, her mother died in a car wreck, leaving Sylvia to be wrested from her lifeless body; by age eight, ``Paw Paw,'' the grandfather who raised Sylvia, began regularly molesting her; at 12, she discovered her grandmother dead in her bed of natural causes, and when her Uncle Mull came to rescue her from her Alabama home, he informed her that he was actually her father. Taken to Nashville to live with Uncle Mull, country/western drummer, and his high-strung wife, Sylvia attended Nashville Christian Academy, where she joined a club dedicated to preparing for the final Rapture—only to witness the suicide of the club's founder, her first love. Understandably, by age 18, when she marries Buddy, a 35-year-old building-supplies salesman, Sylvia has blanked out on most of her past. She takes a job as assistant to a vice-president at Sony Records and dedicates her spare time to writing songs and practicing her stepmother's drums, waiting for her big break. Then Jake Harris, a charismatic singer/songwriter, arrives from California on a Sony p.r. junket—and his tempting sexual advances, along with her husband's pleas to have a child, bring all Sylvia's horrifying memories to the surface. Even readers heartily weary of abuse tales may get hooked by Vaughn's no-frills prose as her heroine attempts to piece her life together against all odds: a commendable accomplishment by an author with a unique and compelling voice.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-41425-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
