A rollicking adventure that sends up and pays homage.
In this short novel set in 1980s London, a boy becomes involved with an underground newspaper operation run by a group of homeless people.
Walker’s tale begins with an unusual premise. It’s 1985, and the city’s major newspapers are relocating their presses from Fleet Street to locations outside the city limits; the cost-cutting measure has dire consequences for the area’s homeless people, who rely on the warmth from the presses in winter. Speaking fondly of the warm air piped up to street level, the titular Nobby, an elder of the community, says, “It’s like having our own central heating system, only it’s outside. Lovely! Snug as a bug in a rug, even on the coldest nights.” However, Spencer Sweetnum, the 10-year-old son of a newspaperman, is the novel’s central character.When he discovers Nobby living in his parents’ shed, the two strike up an immediate friendship, and the elder man lets him in on a grand secret: the forsaken people of the city have come together to create their own paper to get heat flowing through the grates again. They’ve been stealing hardware from other papers’ presses and reassembling it in an abandoned tube station. To help his new comrades, Spencer must sneak around his father, who works in the circulation department at The Scribe. Meanwhile, the shadowy media baron who runs that newspaper, known only as the Proprietor, makes ready to crush his unlikely opposition. In one of several villainous speeches, he exclaims, “We seem to have been victimized by—indeed, have been outsmarted by—no less than four bums and a boy!”
Walker builds a colorful cast of characters in this novel. Like many child protagonists, Spencer doesn’t offer much beyond a sunny, energetic disposition, but Nobby and his friends’ characterizations more than make up for it. There’s Caractacus, who has an eye patch with “an eye crudely drawn on it,” and the enigmatic Kipper, who strikes quite a figure—although the author pays closer attention to his odor, which brings to mind “a touch of something recently deceased.” Mavis, the newspaper’s fashion editor, stylishly dresses in clipped-together plastic bags. And there’s the charismatic Nobby, a talkative old schemer with a big heart. Walker brings this crew to life as well as their unlikely iconoclastic newspaper, The Daily Bread, ostensibly founded just to keep them all warm. However, implausibilities abound: Kipper, for instance, happens to be an engineering genius who’s able to reassemble an entire press from purloined parts, and Spencer’s parents conveniently forget about him for long periods of time as he hangs out underground. But this is a heightened world of slapstick antics, and a few gaps of logic don’t stop the author from having fun, which makes for an enjoyable read. In one memorable scene, for example, a group is cornered by heavies working for the Proprietor. Kipper, like a malodorous superhero, flaps his lapels to waft a “greenish fog” at their pursuers.
A rollicking adventure that sends up and pays homage.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69229-516-5
Page Count: 147
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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