Younger and older readers alike will be baffled by this half-baked adventure.
A preteen bully and a 22-year-old con artist collide in Pascal's thriller.
The creator of the Sweet Valley High series turns to adult fiction with mixed results in a story set in a sleepy town on New York's Long Island. Here, 12-year-old “Big Larry” terrorizes a group of younger neighborhood kids including sensitive 10-year-old Charley and Charley's bright, determined 7-year-old sister, Lucy. Into this small-town scene drops shady, attractive Australian Luke, who has skipped bail and hitchhiked across the country from LA. He and Larry work up a mutual enmity while they're both shoplifting from a local drugstore. When, after a rendezvous on a deserted town beach with sweet, innocent drugstore clerk Daisy Rumkin, Luke takes shelter in a storm drain and is pinned down by falling debris, Larry seizes the opportunity to amp up his bullying game into full-scale torture, with the reluctant aid of the members of his little gang. Having gotten hold of his abusive father's gun, Larry makes plans that include not just the elimination of Luke, but violence inflicted on the entire community. Pascal knows how to craft short, snappy chapters that leave the reader wanting more, and little Lucy, described as “weird” by most of those who know her, makes an appealingly different heroine. But the novel is oddly untethered in time. While it's clear that this is supposed to be a relatively contemporary story—Harry Styles, for example, is the teen heartthrob referenced—the characters say things like “Your pa don't know beans” and “My ma says a bum'll steal the eyes out of your head.” Daisy thinks of herself as a “shopgirl” and has never heard of IMDb. In addition, Luke, in whose head we spend a significant portion of the novel and whose redemption is its main narrative arc, is a singularly unappealing hero.
Younger and older readers alike will be baffled by this half-baked adventure.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9826-1476-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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