Mad, fascinating, and really quite moving in its way: a splendid start both for storywriter Bailie (McSweeney’s, Z End Zine,...
A weird and witty debut about a young man’s difficult adjustment to the afterlife.
All that stuff about the White Light is for real, apparently, but it’s about the only thing you’ll recognize in the Life to Come. Advertising copywriter James Broadhurst, a good family man not given to metaphysics or religion, doesn’t know what to expect after he’s killed in a car accident—just as well, really, since the first thing he sees is an airport baggage claim filled with men dressed like Abraham Lincoln. After he fills out all his forms he’s taken to his new home, an apartment he shares with sullen, taciturn Scott. No one needs money up here, but the refrigerator is always full of beer, and James spends most of his early days drinking and watching television reruns of his funeral. He’s eventually hired by the Komacor Corporation as a proofreader and spends his time working on a brochure describing new software. From what James can see, the afterlife is not that different from the before-life—just a lot more boring. The food is decent but bland, work is easy but pointless, and the television sucks. There are some cute girls at work, but no one seems to be able to have a normal conversation up here, much less a relationship. James starts going to bars in the evening, but these all seem the same after a while (although there is one interesting place patronized by gunshot victims). As he reflects on his past and watches his surviving relatives on TV (their lives, right down to the adulteries, are broadcast on the premium channels), James begins to suspect that life was something bigger than he had thought and to wish that he had a second chance. If only there were another tunnel of White Light somewhere about . . . .
Mad, fascinating, and really quite moving in its way: a splendid start both for storywriter Bailie (McSweeney’s, Z End Zine, etc.) and the newly formed Ig Publishing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-9703125-2-0
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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