A spirited tale about finding a new place in the world.
Banta tells the story of a teenage orphan struggling to start over in small-town Indiana in this debut novel.
It’s the autumn of 1960. When his parents and brother are killed suddenly in a car accident, 17-year-old Malcolm “Weed” Clapper is forced to move from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to live with his grandmother in a tiny town in Indiana. With an injured leg that restricts his movement, Weed is self-conscious around his new peers, particularly the girls—and women—at school. There’s much about his new home that confuses him, like the fact that the local homeless man keeps calling him “Joey” or the strange thumping sounds his grandmother makes at night. In addition, Weed encounters difficulties acclimating to the entrenched racism that categorizes the opinions of his new neighbors, which ranges from a stuffy disdain for blacks to a violent hatred of them. They warn Weed, in friendly and not-so-friendly ways, against mixing with the town’s African-American population. When Weed learns of the strong Ku Klux Klan presence in the area, he is tempted to leave town, but his relationship with a young English teacher makes him reluctant to do so. Weed sets to work befriending the town’s outcasts and untouchables, but when the Klan begins to target one of his new friends, he must decide just how committed he is to his new life—since standing up for his beliefs may just put that life at risk. The novel’s structure is epistolary, told through a series of journal entries—“I figure Kerouac writes,” explains Weed, “and it’s a known fact that he’s cool”—the perfect format for the hero’s jokey, irreverent tone. Through Weed, Banta displays her gift for fresh, evocative language: “Cotton’s rolling chuckle came from so deep inside his chest you would have thought he started it yesterday.” Nothing in the plot or the characters feels entirely original, from the sensitive narrator hiding behind derision to the collection of colorful townsfolk. But Banta’s versions are well-executed and mostly endearing, and while the ending perhaps is a little too tidy to be believable, it still manages to satisfy.
A spirited tale about finding a new place in the world.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943847-40-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Waldorf Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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