Holman (Secret City, U.S.A., 1990, etc.) weaves a terrific story about the nature of reality, honoring the past, and the experience of loss, set in the California of 1932. Colly's mother died in a car accident the year before; his father is a movie stuntman, and everything Colly knows he learned from the movies and from being on the set. When his dad is injured in a stunt, they go to stay in an adobe house in the desert to heal, where Colly meets Benjamin Grey Fox, a retired professor, and his nephew, Ozro, who aren't at all like ``Hollywood Indians.'' Set in italics and alternating with Colly's story is one of a Cahuilla boy, Sparrow, and his grandmother, who see white settlers approaching in 1774. Colly's movie view of the past and Sparrow's history intersect in dreams, in talismans, in animal spirits. How Colly lays both his sorrow and Sparrow's to rest is told in language that dips and soars like the flight of an eagle, carrying readers along with their need to know what happens. While Holman occasionally preaches about the legitimate rights of the First Nations, the bits of movie lore, gorgeous desert descriptions, and deeply moving final scenes amply compensate. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-689-80772-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones.
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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