A funny, sparkling, satisfying read.
A memoir of an English boyhood in the late 1960s.
On a visit to his elderly father, who still lived in the house he grew up in, freelance writer Marshon was commanded to clear his old belongings out of the attic. There, he found a journal he had kept as a 9-year-old during the school year of 1967-68. Aided by the journal, he revisits that bygone time. Marshon, his parents, and his older brother lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Manchester, England. Keen asides illustrate their family life: “We always knew that dinner was ready when the potatoes exploded”; his mother’s rice pudding reminded him of his brother, “as it was very pale, had skin, and was quite thick”; when his father was visited by a mysterious friend named Mr. Johnnie Walker, it always seemed to raise his spirits. The author ran with a group of other 9-year-old boys in the neighborhood. (“Together, our gang’s total IQ barely reached double figures.”) The boys navigated school, with its headmaster “Mugger Murdoch”; pondered the mysteries of girls; had hilarious and potentially dangerous adventures on ball fields, sledding hills, train tracks and ponds; and somehow managed to survive the year. (“Apparently we were all indestructible in those days as there were no seatbelts, airbags, smoke detectors, Heimlich manoeuvres or helmets.”) Marshon has a knack for describing events in a way that conveys the wonder of a 9-year-old with a very funny adult perspective: “Exciting things were always happening at the fair, like ride owners running across the backfields being chased by men with warrants.” He also poignantly looks back at his innocence: “Those days passed like bright, wintry stars on a clear December night, and like kids everywhere, I was oblivious to the fact that my childhood was slipping away with them.” Although references to uniquely British sports, food, and politics may be obscure to an American audience, Marshon’s enjoyable accounts of colorful characters and situations are universal and will leave the reader laughing out loud.
A funny, sparkling, satisfying read.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798301687051
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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