Intriguing journeys through ambiguous states of being.
These short stories, poems, and a novella explore surreal landscapes of emotions and relationships.
The first four parts of this collection each contain a short story followed by three related poems. The final section features a novella and a single poem. A sense of surrealism and uncertain identity underlies these pieces, as in the opening tale, “The Antonym of Flower is Wind,” which begins with a dreamlike image: “The swan that sleeps on people’s bellybuttons.” It’s offered by a young woman called Lorelei, who fascinates the narrator, but he eventually realizes that “something was leaving” inside her, going somewhere he can’t follow. Over the years, some things remind him of Lorelei: the harmonica, fireflies. In the narrator’s mailbox is a letter from Lorelei telling him: “You’re over there, over in the real world. I’m not there….You’d never find me.” He remembers her saying she can’t ever be human, and “in some ways, you’re just like me.” The accompanying poems use associated imagery; in “No Longer Human,” for example, “the fireflies float / then no longer glow / … / So you, too, / so warm and loving, may no longer stay.” In another story, “A Silent Anemone,” a man claims to be from Venus, and the narrator (who pretends to be deaf but isn’t) can’t help believing him. In other tales, characters transform themselves, confront death and evanescence, and look for the real and unreal within the mundane. In his book, Stone (I’m a Duck With Alligator Fingers, 2018) writes in a captivating magical realist vein. His images are dreamy, too, and often melancholic: A girl who tries to sail her ship to the moon discovers that “even in the myth, the moon failed.” Romance, or at least the promise of it, underlies many of these stories, with the mysterious embodied by an attractive young woman. A dream girl isn’t the freshest trope, but it’s complicated by an aura of unease or alienation. At times, the author overrelies on cultural touchstones, especially songs, to establish taste and coolness credentials (including “Another World” by Kinoko Teikoku; “The Dandelion Girl” by Robert F. Young; and Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory).
Intriguing journeys through ambiguous states of being.Pub Date: April 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-49758-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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