Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
In Gold’s debut, small-time Brooklyn hood Howard "Windows" Fenster sells weed and collects vigorish for capo Vinnie Five-Five Spoleto, but Howard’s passion is the Penguin Classics library he inherited from his mob accountant father.
Then Scrunchy Cho, another hoodlum, kills a working girl in Vinnie’s Sheepshead Bay sporting house. That murder ignites a war among Five-Five’s gang, Crazy Bo Moon’s Triad, and Vlad the Impaler’s Brighton Beach Russians. Vinnie’s first casualties are Double Down (shot) and Garlic (pieces stuffed in garbage bags), and so worried Howard, "a half-Jew and as wholly ambivalent," moves out of his sister Judith’s basement. Howard loves Judith, and he’s disappearing to protect her, but he has no place to hide until he meets Ariel, an "ultraconventional girl" in a "pretentious cafe." The love connection’s immediate, and Howard moves into Ariel’s basement while remaining on call for Vinnie. Howard quickly learns well-educated, sophisticated Ariel is obsessed with bondage and sadomasochism, and when she discovers that the monosyllabic and often vulgar Howard is an erudite autodidact rather than the brute of her fantasies, the love affair takes a left turn. Gold has good fun with amoral mobsters like the psychopathic Irish-Italian called IRA, the gluttonous Frankie Hog, and crazy Pauli Bones, who "destroys money in the crematorium of financial idiocy." Dialogue seems spot-on, especially if mob guys rely heavily on f-bombs, but the setting’s more commentary than descriptive. There’s comedy to be had, especially as Howard helps Mrs. Five-Five dispose of a body while contemplating references to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Irony too, as Howard mopes through a critique of capitalism versus communism, characterizes mob violence as being "as meaningless and pointless as…Vietnam and Iraq," and debates Orwell versus Dostoyevsky with Ivan, the lone Russian mobster who doesn’t want to kill him.
Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-443-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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