An ambitious novel that effectively braids corporate greed, outdoorsy grit, and human connection.
An abandoned Borscht Belt resort becomes an unlikely flashpoint in a tale of big business and PTSD.
Nicorvo’s lively, if at times overly busy, debut novel is an ensemble affair involving a land battle for the Standard Grande, a one-time Catskills getaway that Milton, a Vietnam vet, has turned into an alpaca farm/halfway house for vets with PTSD. That sounds like a good hiding place for Bellum, an Army deserter who can’t stomach leaving for her third deployment to Afghanistan. But Milton has debts and late-stage cancer, and a conglomerate called IRJ, Inc. is pondering a takeover of the land for fracking purposes. A pair of informal spies are conducting advance surveillance: Evangelína, a spitfire health nut and family friend of IRJ’s COO, and Ray, an Iraq vet who’s split with Milton but lives in a yurt near the camp. It takes a while for Nicorvo to get all these chess pieces in their appropriate positions, and he’s prone to overlong descriptions and gassy exchanges of military tough talk. But by midpoint, after a key character is mauled by a cougar near the Grande, the novel finds a solid groove, becoming a seamless blend of road-trip saga, love story, and critique of military contractors. Bellum is the best-drawn of the cast of characters, from her PTSD issues to her estranged, pill-slinging husband to her struggle to find solid footing as a deserter. (The novel suggests that those who turn themselves in are forgiven with relative speed.) As such, for all its convolutions, the novel is thematically a straightforward tale about finding a home: “Maybe the place to begin was to make one supportive relationship and go gradually upward and outward from there,” Bellum thinks, but Nicorvo smartly renders the legal, corporate, and military forces that can stand in the way of so simple a goal.
An ambitious novel that effectively braids corporate greed, outdoorsy grit, and human connection.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10894-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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