A clever work with an intriguing format and a memorable protagonist.
In Chesley’s comic novel, a California man with Asperger syndrome chronicles his emancipation in online reviews.
Marcus Katz has a lot of opinions, and he’s putting them all on Yelp. He loves the fish tacos at Tacos Baja Ensanada, and Jonathan’s Steam Cleaning is good at getting stains out of a carpet, though Marcus is not a fan of the smell of the deodorant they use. These opinions are not the reason his Yelp reviews are starting to go viral, however; it’s because of the 22-year-old’s tendency to include bits of autobiography in his reviews. Marcus’ mother just died, offering him the opportunity to review the Cedars-Sinai cafeteria and Palisades Mortuary, and his older sister, Lisa, forces him into a conservatorship: “Like a lot of people, she acts like Asperger’s is somehow related to being stupid,” Marcus notes. “In fact Aspies are statistically of medium to high intelligence. I won’t tell you what I am. I will let you decide.” When the judge-appointed conservator tries to push Marcus into a group home, he flees with his dog, Sadie, leaving a breadcrumb trail of Yelp reviews and making himself a cause célèbre in the process. Chesley believably crafts Marcus’ earnest reviewing voice as well as that of his Yelp friend, Durinda Dowling, who also has Asperger. He notes one of their interactions in a hotel review: “A sign by the driveway in front said ‘15 minute check-in parking only’….Inside she asked me if I wanted to come up, but I had already parked for a minute and a half and I didn’t want to get a ticket so I said no.” Overall, it’s a fun conceit, and although Marcus’ unwavering Yelp persona at times becomes a bit tedious, the book’s zippy pacing and short length keep the novel moving along at a brisk pace. Marcus’ story also raises intriguing questions about the nature of conservatorship while demonstrating the ways that people form communities online—and how these can spill over into one’s personal life.
A clever work with an intriguing format and a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78904-982-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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