The best comedic novel in years. Handey is a master. Fans will be quoting lines from this book for a long time. If you like...
Deep Thoughts creator Handey (What I’d Say to the Martians, 2008, etc.) pens his first novel, an absurd adventure set in Hawaii.
The unreliable narrator is Slurps (he picked the nickname). He’s clueless, inappropriate, delusional, dim: an all-around misguided, comedic nightmare. Among his life goals: to someday throw a hand grenade. “Maybe I’ll get to do that in Heaven,” he muses. As the book opens, Slurps and his friend Don book a vacation to Hawaii (a “mysterious place” Slurps has never heard of) to get away from it all—in Don’s case, from an ex-wife; in Slurps’ case, from violent men to whom he owes money. After receiving a Hawaiian “treasure map” from their travel agent showing the way to a valuable relic called the Golden Monkey, the two decide to steal the object. Before they depart for the islands, Slurps visits Uncle Lou, an ailing treasure hunter who, upon learning of Slurps’ plan to steal the Golden Monkey, drugs Slurps and then implants a tracking device in his tooth. “The trouble with going to Uncle Lou’s was he was always drugging you,” Slurps notes. Indeed. The Hawaii of the book is not a place any tourist would recognize. Honolulu is a “dirty, coastal backwater” stinking of fish heads and featuring in its town square “a bronze statue of the discoverer of Hawaii, Sir Edmund Honolulu III,” not to mention lots of bums and prostitutes. This Hawaii has its own currency, the paleeka, and the bars serve bowls of dried geckos in lieu of beer nuts. The beaches showcase rusty cars that have washed ashore. Slurps' observations are epic throughout: "A scary-looking transvestite put flower necklaces around our necks and said, 'Aloha.' Someone told me later that aloha is a curse word." Things take a turn for the much worse when Slurps acquires a hula-girl souvenir that in fact turns out to be cursed. (See Bobby Brady in the 1972 Brady Bunch Hawaii episodes.) Disasters ensue. The journey into the jungle in search of the Golden Monkey finds Slurps and Don battling pirates, getting hit with blow darts and meeting a native woman that Slurps hits on using his favorite pickup line, "what's your religion?" The doomed expedition culminates in a riot, complete with a pitchfork-wielding mob, inside a national park. It's Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness meets the 2008 film Tropic Thunder. Ridiculous fun through and through. You have to love a guy who goes out looking for hiking supplies and comes back with bottles of scotch and packs of cigarettes. A true outdoorsman, he.
The best comedic novel in years. Handey is a master. Fans will be quoting lines from this book for a long time. If you like the work of George Saunders, this one's for you.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-455-52238-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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