A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.
Mormon missionaries encounter hard times and a Mephistophelian menace in von Osten’s (This Happy Life, 2013, etc.) raucous coming-of-age satire.
In 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, plenty of young Mormon men try to escape the draft by undertaking two-year missionary stints for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But John Gaumless, a Salt Lake City native whose high draft number makes him exempt from call-up, has genuinely spiritual motives, stoked by his high-minded girlfriend, Marylou. Alas, his time proselytizing in Northern Ireland gradually erodes his illusions about the church. The Irish people, Protestant and Catholic alike, respond to Mormon overtures with curses, hurled rocks and tossed chamber pots. The mission’s president is a feckless man who spends his time feeding his swans as his seething wife and scheming underlings plot petty power plays. Bored, lonely, cold and depressed, the other young missionaries transgress the Mormon strictures against alcohol and engage in back-stabbing rivalries and furtive gay trysts. John, a floundering innocent, finds his only friend in Orson Roundtower—a handsome, sardonic Brigham Young University basketball star who prefers Dostoevsky to the Book of Mormon and regards LDS doctrine with bemused contempt. (At one point, Roundtower ups his conversion numbers by bribing an Irish family to undergo Mormon baptism in exchange for bottles of orange Fanta.) John finds Roundtower to be an island of relaxed urbanity in a sea of hypocritical dogmatism, but as their relationship intensifies, he starts to wonder why villagers flee from his friend—and why so many missionaries keep dying in his vicinity. Von Osten’s sendup of Mormon doctrine, rituals and culture is detailed and cutting. Marylou’s antic letters to John, stuffed with Mormon piety and ditzy uplift—“When the tough get going, the going gets tough!”—are particularly hilarious. The book’s portrait of bedraggled teenage missionaries, feigning religious ardor as a coverup for self-interest and bureaucratic inertia, is well-observed throughout. The narrative does feel somewhat aimless, though, except when Roundtower takes center stage with his debonair charisma, rakish humor and unapologetic mischievousness. Before Roundtower’s villainy subsides, a bit disappointingly, into mere melodrama, he presents a compelling case for why deviltry remains such an appealing alternative to holiness.
A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500668648
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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