by Henry Sutton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2005
A disturbing, raw tale of masculine rage and family dysfunction, bluntly told.
A self-absorbed petty thief's life is turned upside down when he is reunited with his estranged 13-year-old daughter.
Although Mark has his complaints (not enough sex from his hot blonde wife, too few jobs in carpentry), his life in Norwich, England, with Nicole and their young daughter is peaceful. When his ex-girlfriend Kim calls to say he needs to see his 13-year-old daughter Lily, this peace is shattered. A decade earlier, Kim disappeared, taking three-year-old Lily with her. Mark hasn’t seen or heard from the pair since—nor has he given them much thought. Now, the memories come crashing back: the violent fights he and Kim engaged in; the funny-looking child they used to mock, calling her a “garden gnome”; the rampant indiscretions. When Mark finally meets Lily, after convincing himself he is ready to be her dad again, she is a thin, angry child who wears skimpy clothes and talks of sexual abuse at her mother's boyfriends' hands. Her bitterness sparks Mark's temper, causing him to verbally lash out at the child, at Kim—at one point surmising that maybe he didn't hit her hard enough when they argued—and at Nicole, whom he suspects of infidelity. Still, he remains drawn to the girl and tries clumsily to become her friend. Her willful rages and sarcasm remind him of his own childhood, shattered by his parents' divorce. Mark and Nicole take Lily in at Christmas, but her lying, thieving and drinking fray their nerves, and soon thereafter, her mother packs her off to an institution for disturbed children. In a crushing, grim climax, Mark sets off to rescue her.
A disturbing, raw tale of masculine rage and family dysfunction, bluntly told.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-85242-837-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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