Still, as the disaster’s 102nd anniversary approaches, Gaynor’s account surpasses, in subtlety if not in scope, so many...
The fictionalized saga of 14 Irish immigrants from a single parish who sailed on the Titanic.
The year is 1982. Maggie, 87, has never discussed the voyage with any of her descendants, including her great-granddaughter Grace, a journalism student at Chicago’s Northwestern University. Grace has been offered an internship at the Tribune—if she can pitch an original angle for a feature story. But when her father dies unexpectedly, she drops out of Northwestern to assist her mother, who has multiple sclerosis, also leaving her boyfriend, Jimmy. Two years later, Maggie jolts Grace back on the career path by deciding to finally come clean about her experience as one of the few third-class passengers who survived the Titanic. The historical sections cannot help but pull focus from the heartwarming frame story. A pastiche of journal entries, letters, telegrams and other archival material, some real, some convincingly faux, relates how 14 parishioners from the village of Ballysheen, County Mayo, decide to emigrate. Once aboard the revolutionary new ocean liner, Maggie and her giggly teenage girlfriends charm Harry, a Liverpudlian third-class steward, who devotes himself to making their passage pleasant. He helps Maggie send a “Marconigram” from the ship to Séamus, the love she left behind. Unfortunately, a certain iceberg intervenes. Her transmission is interrupted, altering its meaning. Harry manages to get Maggie on the last lifeboat; 12 of her fellow travelers are not so lucky. Gaynor wisely avoids the usual Titanic tropes (Astors and Strauses are scarcely mentioned), imagining the recollections of ordinary passengers and of the people anxiously awaiting news of them. Once Grace’s article goes the 1982 equivalent of viral, the parallel stories wrap up a bit too neatly, especially in the romance department.
Still, as the disaster’s 102nd anniversary approaches, Gaynor’s account surpasses, in subtlety if not in scope, so many flashier treatments.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231686-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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