A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.
In this surgical examination of being young, female, and unfulfilled, debut author George employs not just a scalpel, but a whole kit of ominous and eerily specific instruments.
Acerbic and sly, this five-story collection explores the elaborate performance of identity and the palliative comfort of opting out of self-obsessed scenesterism, giving a knowing flick of the hand to artistic imitators and impostors alike. Plunging up to her elbows into the morass of (post)modern living, George picks apart things often mistaken for love (desperation, fearful neediness, projected desires, ego propping) and maturity (partnering, parenting, settling into a beige-and-vanilla existence after a clean break with youthful pursuits). Details accumulate haltingly, stepwise, like bits of a dream remembered upon waking, even as they threaten to slip from the dreamer's grasp, and George walks us through a thick fog with a dim flashlight alongside characters who can't quite apprehend the rules of the familiar-but-foreign places into which they've been flung. In "Guidance/The Party," a woman is brusquely prepped by a recondite entity, known only as "The Guide," for an adulthood more like an afterlife than a continuation of her earlier existence. In the title story, a cross between a reincarnation tale, an anxiety dream, and a particularly prurient version of “The Sims,” the narrator is given the chance to start over—from where, what, and by whom is never revealed—as a young woman of uncertain age in a place like a spurious micronation on the cusp of collapse. Though George occasionally dips into gratuitous weirdness and has a tendency toward list-making that can become tedious, overall these stories satisfy as they spit out one sardonic insight after the next. Take "Futures In Child Rearing," on the confusion, anxiety, and pressures that surround procreation: "I'm trying to have a baby. I'd like to name her Ocean, but I fear the implications: the void, the vast emptiness, the unknown, big whale shits, giant octopuses, or other possible hentai tentacle situations. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: Transaction Declined, it reads on the screen." By the final story, "Instruction," we can't be sure if we've been given a glimpse into a future where our absurdities have played out to their furthest extremes or perhaps the actual present, only we haven't quite realized yet the extent of our collective abjection.
A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9973666-2-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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