Fairly short ruminations, all written in a plain, unambiguous style.
Queer fiction from Canada, more anecdote and personal reflection than stories per se, a number involving a character named Ivan Coyote (The Slow Fix, 2008, etc.).
The sexuality of Coyote is never far from the center of her narrative arc. She reflects on growing up different in Whitehorse, Yukon Territories, and on having the persona but not the language for “butch.” Many of her stories revolve around family—an alcoholic father who eventually remarries his childhood sweetheart, a grandmother who has an affair while her husband is out of the country on a job—while others reflect Coyote’s preoccupation with gender and identity, though the line between the themes of family and identity is blurry. In “Objects in Mirror Are Queerer Than They Appear,” for example, after sifting through a photograph album and seeing pictures of herself as a child, Coyote tries to track down when her family knew she was different. Her Uncle John affirms and reassures her by saying, “ ‘We were just glad you weren’t stupid. There’s no cure for stupid.’ ” In “Some of My Best Friends are Rednecks” Coyote feels shame because a stereotypical “man-hating lesbian” berates one of Coyote’s friends for reading her book on a bus. “Straight Teens Talk Queer” focuses on how a group of kids at a Vancouver Public Library book camp look at issues of homophobia, and Coyote draws comfort about the possibility of cultural change from their attitude of acceptance. Other stories give us advice about how to get on the “road to repair” after a failed love affair (“Step One. Get up. Do it now. There you go.”). A follow-up to this story involves the “butch version of the ten steps to getting over the ex” (e.g., “Get a haircut…Road trip…Going places with your dog in your truck”).
Fairly short ruminations, all written in a plain, unambiguous style.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55152-371-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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