Joyfully evoked with period details and pop-culture references, 1980s nostalgia is the only excuse for marketing this book...
In a small town in North Jersey in the late 1980s, a 14-year-old boy and his Commodore 64 find love and trouble.
It all starts with the Vanna White issue of Playboy, which in the era of Tipper Gore and Jerry Falwell, “no shopkeeper in America was going to sell…to a fourteen-year-old boy.” But Billy Marvin and his two best friends, Alf (looks just like the alien Alf on TV) and Clark (incredibly handsome but with a congenitally deformed left hand), sure as hell won’t let that stop them. These are boys who have rented Kramer vs. Kramer from the video store more than a dozen times solely to fast-forward to the “fifty-three seconds of jaw-dropping full-frontal nudity” when Dustin Hoffman’s hot one-night stand gets out of bed to use the bathroom. (It’s the very best PG-13 has to offer.) The only place in town that sells Playboy is Zelinsky’s Typewriters and Office Supplies, located in the small, dying downtown. During their first attempt to get the magazine—they dress in suits and try to pass for businessmen—Billy meets Mary Zelinsky, a “fat girl” who is as obsessed with computer programming as he is. She is far more advanced. His biggest achievement so far is a game called Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley (Christie is formed from slashes, parentheses, and other symbols) while Mary has digitized the music of Phil Collins. Together, they develop a game called The Impossible Fortress to enter in a contest for young programmers. Working beside Mary is for Billy like “finger painting next to Pablo Picasso.” But while he is falling in love, Clark and Alf have developed a much more complicated and dangerous scheme for liberating the Playboy magazines. Unfortunately, the criminal caper and the big reveal that follows it aren’t believable.
Joyfully evoked with period details and pop-culture references, 1980s nostalgia is the only excuse for marketing this book to adults; otherwise, Rekulak’s debut is a middle-grade novel all the way. A good one!Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4441-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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