Though a bit inconsistent, Daneshvari has great comic timing. She’s an author to watch.
Channeling Fay Weldon’s classic The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, this debut novel concerns an ugly girl’s transformation and its menacing consequences.
The opening pages of Anna Norton’s saga will have the reader gasping (not quite in sympathy) at her sad, dysfunctional life. From childhood to college, Anna has been ostracized and alone, a social misfit in search of a fairy godmother. None exist in Ohio, so she is left as is: fat, with cystic acne, black stretch pants, dandruff and dried food in the corners of her mouth. After graduating with a degree in molecular biology, she moves to New York, where she finds her FG (fairy godmother) in the form of Janice, a successful caterer who hires Anna as an assistant. FG Janice sends Anna walking all over the city in search of obscure ingredients; takes her to the Gap, so that Anna can start dressing in simple, elegant black; and ensures that all of Anna’s neighborhood takeaway establishments refuse to serve her food. Thanks to diet, exercise and a trip to the dermatologist, Anna is, if not suddenly Audrey Hepburn, at least an attractive, healthy young woman, stylishly attired. As karmic reward, she meets Ben Reynolds and is dumbstruck by his astounding male beauty. Ben, bored by shallow models, falls for Anna, and her life becomes perfect—except for all those women flirting with Ben every moment of the day. Eaten up by 22 years of insecurities, Anna embarks on The Makedown, in which Ben will become a little less desirable and remain with Anna forever. She dresses him in flannel, puts Nair in his shampoo, convinces him that a Skör bar is a new health snack, cancels his gym membership and has him grow a shaggy beard. In the process, Ben’s ego is destroyed and it is up to Ann to reverse the makedown, even if it ends their relationship.
Though a bit inconsistent, Daneshvari has great comic timing. She’s an author to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-69988-4
Page Count: 326
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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