A tale with some well-written passages, but its narrator’s misogyny and narcissism will appeal only to like-minded readers.
In Bukowski’s debut novel, an English teacher weaves his hopes about a young Ukrainian woman he’s met online with tales of tending to his cats and going to strip clubs.
When Frank Gelaitis, 29, a ninth-grade English teacher in Broken Hill, Ohio, sees a photo of Annie, 19, in his “Russian Romance” catalog, he’s completely smitten and can’t help writing to her. American women, he thinks, conduct dates like job interviews and they unaccountably prefer insensitive, unintelligent, or even criminally insane boyfriends to him. He lives in a trailer park and can’t move out because, without him, the park’s feral cats would starve. Frank sees himself as a modern-day St. Francis who believes in love and compassion; at the same time, he harshly judges most people and their pursuits, such as suntanning (“Am I the only one who understands [poet Robinson] Jeffers when he writes, ‘Be Angry at the Sun’?”). Especially disturbing to Frank is the “absurdist tragedy” of society’s expectations for men, whose only reward for conforming, he believes, is “to come home to what passes for ‘average’ American women these days: overweight, bitchy, demanding, and badly-aging.” (Frank describes his own body as “only average at best.”) Three or four times a week, he seeks escape in strip clubs. Some quasi-romantic successes, such as a young girl’s crush on him, boost his confidence, and as he prepares to visit Annie in the Ukraine, he hopes for the best. The pseudonymous Bukowski offers a complex portrait of his protagonist and gives him some genuinely admirable qualities, such as how he lovingly cares for felines. The author can turn a vivid phrase, as when he describes how Kiev’s “winding cobblestone roads [lead] past colorful little houses that must have sprung up like mushrooms in a book of fairy tales written by God’s youngest daughter.” But Frank’s ugly attitude toward women is pervasive, and he seems narcissistic to the point of delusion. The protagonist’s description of the aforementioned 13-year-old girl as a “smoldering Lolita” is also highly off-putting.
A tale with some well-written passages, but its narrator’s misogyny and narcissism will appeal only to like-minded readers.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5349-8347-2
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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