A light and lively sendup of modern woes.
A recently divorced, financially struggling mom faces online dating challenges when a nude picture of her surfaces on the internet.
You would think things couldn't get worse for Penelope Lemon. Since the timer ran out on her marriage to the biggest nerd in her neck of Virginia, she and her son—bullied and dubbed Fart Boy by his schoolmates—have had to move into her parents' basement. Her job as the top waitress at Coonskins, a so-called roadhouse where bus tours unload patrons to compete for tables with "a once-in-a-lifetime view of the parking lot and the traffic on Lee Highway," could easily be mistaken for one of the circles of hell. For a 40th birthday gift, her mother has bought her a Christian dating app called Divote, where she's begun to receive messages from hunky prospects like BrettCorinthians2:2, but her best friends, Sandy and Rachel, are convinced she'd be better off doing macrame or reading The Kite Runner than wading back into the dating pool. Then something happens to prove their point. While navigating through the porn-site pop-ups that make it so annoying to use her father's ancient computer, she's sucked in by an ad for PaybacksAreHeaven.com. There she finds herself particularly engaged by a photo of a sleepy redhead on a waterbed. Then the memories come flooding back. "Yes, now that she thought of it, she had definitely posed nude while hitting a bong. The bong was green. Her name was Tinkerbell. Recalling all this, Penelope spent a moment wondering if she was really meant for life in the middle class." Majors (Loves Winning Plays, 2012, etc.) writes lines like that for breakfast, so you'll want to stay for lunch.
A light and lively sendup of modern woes.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8071-6951-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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