It be rich bottom-folk dialogue amid the heavy weather. Readers will drag their hearts about like rocks.
Hill’s beclouded third is something of a variation on his A Life for a Life (1998), in which a Louisiana lad, convicted of killing a grocery-store clerk, is put away and, during his six years as a prisoner, is befriended and regularly visited by the dead clerk’s forgiving father.
This time, a father, Tyrone Stokes, a Louisiana drug addict who has gone cold turkey in jail, is released on parole after ten years, only to find when he arrives home in Brownsville that his 17-year-old son Marcus is on death row for murdering a white girl and has but a week to live before execution. Tyrone cannot yield that his son’s character allows for such an act, and he bends himself to saving his son’s life and getting an acquittal within the short time left. But Tyrone is up against a dozen stonewalls that author Hill has built, starting with Marcus’s own puffy-eyed defeatism when Tyrone visits him in the pen. Worse still is the gloom over the home Tyrone has returned to: Daddy dead of worry over Tyrone five years into Tyrone’s jailing; Mother who, in poor health, may die early of worry over both Tyrone and tangled-up Marcus; and Sister René, absolute hell to live with, her sharkteeth in Tyrone’s backside at every turn, blaming him for all the family’s woes, even for Marcus: “Like father, like son.” She wants him to leave. Tyrone’s parole officer as well is a Medusa, freezing Tyrone stone cold. Meanwhile, Marcus’s lawyer, who had the lad plead guilty, is little help until Tyrone finds witnesses who just might help free his gone-be-fried kid.
It be rich bottom-folk dialogue amid the heavy weather. Readers will drag their hearts about like rocks.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7582-0276-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
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