Worse, the cliché-ridden novel sends uncomfortable cues: Are readers really supposed to blame Clarissa’s younger brother for...
A self-consciously erudite cockatoo narrates this avian-human romance from Rubio (The Woodsman’s Daughter, 2005, etc.).
In 1993, cockatoo Caruso lives on Ocracoke Island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks with Clarissa, a redheaded chef who whips up ambitious culinary delicacies while declaring her own favorite foods remain her beloved late grandmother's traditional Southern dishes. (Health-conscious readers may cringe at a chef who never seems to wash her hands and lets her bird loose in the kitchen.) Caruso became a domestic pet after he was kidnapped from his bird family in Australia years earlier. One smart cockatoo, Caruso is given to ruminating on man’s narcissistic self-importance, following the teachings of the “Great Mother” and quoting Emily Dickinson. That appreciation of poetry came from Caruso’s first owner, Theodore. A saintly romantic, Theodore retired from his career as headmaster of a boys school to move next door to the woman he’d silently loved since childhood despite her long marriage to a rich bully. Before entering a nursing home, Theodore introduced Caruso to concepts of love the bird carries with him as he faces a similar romantic crisis of his own. Caruso is in love with the giggly, annoyingly sweet Clarissa and basks in her attentive affection. Then Clarissa meets Joe, who has come to surf on Ocracoke while on summer break from studying environmental law. Clarissa's past boyfriends didn't threaten Caruso, but she seems serious about Joe. Plucking out his feathers in avian distress, Caruso begins plotting to win Clarissa back. Unfortunately, the cockatoo companion Clarissa finds to mollify Caruso only annoys him before fatally diving headlong into a pot of pasta sauce after a tantalizing feather Caruso has purposely dropped—a moment of unintentional comic relief in the slog through whimsy and New Age–y environmentalism.
Worse, the cliché-ridden novel sends uncomfortable cues: Are readers really supposed to blame Clarissa’s younger brother for being emotionally troubled or dislike her sous chef because he’s effeminate?Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61822-031-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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