A fast-paced, gritty look at the back streets of Liverpool that could benefit from more depth and less dirt. Still, newcomer...
A tough Liverpudlian college girl delves into the darker sides of life, including female prostitutes, the “brass” of the title.
Millie and Jamie are best friends and partners in drugs and drinking, though, much to Millie’s chagrin, Jamie is planning to settle down and marry Anne Marie, a boring but pretty ex-model turned cosmetician. The story alternates between Jamie’s and Millie’s viewpoints, though it’s clearly Millie’s. She lives at home with Dad, a handsome college professor Millie’s fellow coeds swoon over, and she’s supposed to be working on her thesis. Instead, she spends most of her time in bars and on the street, pursuing ladies of the night, many of whom spurn her (one calls her a “perv” for wanting lesbian sex). British first-timer Walsh skillfully handles the local vernacular—it sounds real yet is far more comprehensible to an American ear than, say, that of Irvine Walsh, who’s an obvious influence. The raw style works best in the sex scenes: graphic, erotic, disturbing at once. But when Millie rapes a young girl in a bathroom stall (all the while assuring herself, and the reader, that “she’s letting me do this to her”), Millie goes from a somewhat dysfunctional young woman to a sexual predator—a shift that doesn’t ring true, given the broad strokes she’s drawn with. The story that takes over in the last quarter—Millie’s discovery that her father slept with her mother’s sister, explaining why her mother left years before—is much more compelling than the pub-hopping, cocaine-addled earlier scenes, though it does feel tacked on, as if Walsh rambled through a diary of Millie’s daily life before getting to the real meat of her character.
A fast-paced, gritty look at the back streets of Liverpool that could benefit from more depth and less dirt. Still, newcomer Walsh’s energy and language give an entertaining ride.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-484-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
