Cederborg’s debut reads like a dream journal of mystical tales, poetry and nonfiction essays that reflect her Danish culture.
Three sections make up this thin volume: “Fantastic Tales, Fables and Stories of Realities Beyond Reality,” “Poems,” and “The Weird World of Reality: Ezine-Articles.” The author’s brief tales—the longest of which runs six pages—range from the terrifying to the enchanted, from a spirit who visits a young widow to impregnate her with the Antichrist to a congress of African animals that discusses the barbarity of humans. In one tale, a man on a train attacks a newspaper with scissors, leaving behind a “slaughterhouse” of the “severed facial traits of celebrities.” In the next, an underdeveloped giraffe named Oliver learns to triumph from his shortcomings. In another, an orphan named Sylvia challenges “Mr. Reaper Mortuus” and eventually banishes him with a swift blow of her Barbie doll. One part Hans Christian Anderson—whom Cederbourg references often, including a short, compelling essay on the author’s “discarded sister”—and one part Aesop’s fables, with a little bit of O. Henry thrown in, Cederborg’s stories read as if transcribed from someone speaking a halting, overly formal English—which suits a few of the more bizarre tales well but can confuse the reader. Overall, the book is incohesive and unfocused. The stories are rife with redundancies—at one point, a narrator writes of “a quite handsome and also nice-looking man.” The book also contains numerous typos and simple mistakes. In the essay, “When Women Were Punished for Being Women,” Cederborg confuses “loose” with “lose” in two different contexts within the same paragraph, when she discusses “lose” women not being “let lose” from an island prison in Denmark. The poetry that fills out the center is economical but undisciplined and unremarkable. The essays, or “e-zine articles,” that close the book contain some mysterious facts and myths from the characters of Cederborg’s hometown of Copenhagen, but they don’t bring the various pieces assembled here into a compelling whole.
An odd assemblage of short writings.Pub Date: June 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456776893
Page Count: 116
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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