Tackles a serious theme of forlornness with sincerity, buoyancy, and wit.
O’Connor’s debut is a coming-of-age tale of an Irish teen in 1996 who, on learning he’s adopted, plans to track down his birth parents.
Cork, Ireland, native Benjamin Hackett celebrates his 18th birthday with “a stack of pints at the local pub.” Awakening the next morning a year older and hung over, Ben returns home to a shock: his parents have decided to tell him he was adopted. He’s understandably upset and wants to find the parents he believes abandoned him and “punch them in their noses.” Enlisting his pal JJ for companionship and JJ’s Fiat 127, Ben heads to the Barnamire Convent in Cork, where he was born. Unfortunately, mere yards away from the convent, the two friends are mugged by a peculiar (but armed) fellow who insists they call him Apache. The nuns, meanwhile, are less than helpful in providing details on Ben’s adoption, and police show up to arrest Ben and JJ for trespassing. Getting the info on his birth parents expeditiously may require Ben to hobnob with criminal sorts and do a few things he’ll surely regret later. All for a potential reunion that shows no indication of being a happy one. O’Connor forgoes sentiment early on: Ben describes the unknown couple who birthed him as “rancid parents.” But what could have been a dark, dreary tale is sweetened by a surprising amount of humor. JJ, for one, offsets Ben’s ever-present ire with drollery; seeing a “Trespassers will die” sign, he notes, “That seems fairly unambiguous.” There are, however, more sober moments; Ben does favors in exchange for help—often something illicit that could put his life or others’ in peril. O’Connor’s lilting prose beautifies his tale, like a house that “looked nothing more than a teensy white dot high against the rocks with seagulls squabbling over which one of them was due a perch on her chimneypot.”
Tackles a serious theme of forlornness with sincerity, buoyancy, and wit.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-46-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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