Readers drawn to this will know exactly what they are looking for, and they will find it.
A companion volume of light verse for fans of the radio host’s A Prairie Home Companion.
All poetry depends on voice, even more so in this first collection of poetry by Keillor (Life Among the Lutherans, 2009, etc.), whose sonorous, incantatory tone would balance the whimsy of the page. The reader will likely hear the writer’s voice in his ear when scanning this verse, and will recognize that these limericks, rhyming jokes and more bittersweet meditations are better consumed one by one than many at a single sitting. That same voice, of course, distinguishes Keillor’s prose as well, underscoring everything from his attitude to his subject matter—the droll, deadpan delight in the thoroughly Midwestern perspective—but the imperative to rhyme (which almost all of these short poems do) gives him license to be a little sillier than usual. His template suggests the influence of Ogden Nash, fellow New Yorker writer (and Midwestern native) Calvin Trillin and Roy Blount Jr., but it also has plenty of Chuck Berry (including a mashup of Berry and a fellow St. Louis versifier on “T.S. Eliot Rock”), old blues songs and jazz standards, and bawdy ballads that don’t seem so naughty when it is Keillor expressing “A sudden urge / to merge.” And there are couplets that seem to exist simply for the sake of rhyme: “I’m not a Mormon, nor are you, / Neither was Harmon Killebrew.” His verse takes him far from his native Minnesota, typically as the tourist in Seattle, San Francisco or Manhattan, while never forsaking his common-sense pragmatism or keen eye for the absurd.
Readers drawn to this will know exactly what they are looking for, and they will find it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2161-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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