None
A vibrant landscape of a family shattered by divorce, letting time and choices bring the pieces back together in moving on or letting go.
Ward’s (Hunger, 2001) second novel begins from the perspective of Jack Manoli, lying on his deathbed in the condo he shares with his much younger second wife, Sylvie. His love for Sylvie, his former-secretary-turned-business-partner-and-wife, is absorbing and passionate enough to have caused Jack to start up an affair many years ago and leave his children, Mark and Shelley, with their unstable mother. Upon Jack’s death, his now-adult children are left to decide what is to become of the Rockport lake house that was Sylvie and Jack’s sanctuary, the foundation where their affair solidified into a life together and the site full of bad memories for Mark, as it was where father and son’s relationship broke apart. For Mark, a pot-smoking mosaic artist, art imitates life; his anger is dangerously bottled up, destroying his relationship with his live-in girlfriend just as he shatters ceramic and glass for his mosaic landscapes. Shelley is a teacher working tirelessly to protect her younger brother and create the family life she never had for her husband and two daughters. She hopes to help Mark find a balance “somewhere in between perfection and devastation” creating a reality “where all the many pieces of us—the pleasant and painful—can be reconfigured into an imperfect but solid-enough life”— something their father also strived to create in choosing Sylvie. Ward fashions characters with rich detail, allowing each to leave a distinct impression. While not always likable (Sylvie comes off as a selfish stepmother at times), they are nonetheless genuine. Building layer upon layer of each family member’s story, Ward shows the complexity of divorce from all sides, even revisiting Jack’s thoughts throughout the book. Mark and Shelley are faced with what to do with the lake house and whether to shed the hurt caused by their father’s choices by making new choices for themselves to gain happiness, peace and, ultimately, freedom. A rich, complex novel that mixes art and life into a story about the decisions that lead to healing or hurt.
NonePub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453860045
Page Count: 349
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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