Despite her typical wit, intelligence and discernment, Giffin may not be able to win her audience with this problematic...
After the death of a beloved family friend, Shea Rigsby realizes she’s been treading water. Will a spectacular new job and a fairy-tale romance change everything or simply remind her of what she truly loves?
At 33, Shea is in a listless relationship and has a fun but dead-end job at her hometown alma mater, Walker University. Walker is in Texas, where football is right next to God, and its highly successful football program has been under the sage and celebrated guidance of head coach Clive Carr for years. Shea’s practically a member of the Carr family; her mom is best friends with Connie, Coach’s wife, and Shea’s been best friends with their daughter, Lucy, since birth. But after Connie succumbs to cancer, everyone is emotionally unmoored, and they collectively decide to focus their energy on moving Shea forward. Breaking off with her aimless boyfriend opens up space for a thrilling new relationship with a former Walker superstar now playing in the NFL. And with a little help from Coach, she lands her dream job as a Dallas sports reporter. But even as everything seems to be going so well, Shea is a little stunned to find that she isn't really happy and that her job as a reporter may force her to face some unsettling truths about her star-kissed boyfriend, the world of college sports and the man she’s had a lifelong crush on—for the good and the bad. Best-seller Giffin (Where We Belong, 2012, etc.), known for her insightful exploration of women’s deepest desires, has taken on a hard-sell storyline in her newest novel. While her in-depth look at football, family dynamics and unexpected romance is both compelling and perceptive, it also takes some disconcerting turns, and readers may find the story ventures too far outside their comfort zones.
Despite her typical wit, intelligence and discernment, Giffin may not be able to win her audience with this problematic romantic journey.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-54688-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2014
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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