A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.
In Knox’s (After the Gazebo, 2015, etc.) latest short story collection, characters struggle to maintain connections with others despite natural disasters and more mundane circumstances, such as aging.
Haley and her parents hardly have it easy in drought-ridden Toledo, Ohio, in the opening title story. They take family outings to a nearly empty downtown; water is rationed, so Haley’s dad gives her some of his supply despite his own cracked lips. Other tales also feature social units, typically familial, facing menaces that bring emotional torment to the surface. A man named Owen, for example, in “Running Toward the Sun,” is racing to help raise money for breast and reproductive-system cancer research. But an unexpected calamity forces him to face the truth that he’s running from: the fact that his wife, a cancer survivor, has cheated on him multiple times. In “A Perpetual State of Awe,” a woman and her son are stuck inside their home due to a heavy snowstorm, and the abode is at risk of collapsing—much like her marriage. In other instances, families simply strive to stay together; an elderly, troubled couple finds common ground in “The Couple on the Roof.” There are occasional touches of sci-fi, but Knox so adeptly molds her believable characters that the apocalyptic settings seem less surreal. In “Nebraska,” for instance, a small-town woman searches for items in an overcrowded local grocery store that’s full of people who are missing body parts or growing extra ones. The muted aspect of the genre elements mirrors the cautious tone of Knox’s prose: “Houses are being built everywhere, exact replicas of each other excepting the color of the paint, or the direction the garage is facing.” The tales are effectively linked by recurring themes but also by recurring characters—most notably the tattooed loner Rattle, who makes three appearances as part of a doomed relationship (“Don’t Tease the Elephants”); as the father of an estranged daughter (“West on N Road”); and, possibly, on his deathbed (“The Slope of a Line”).
A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.Pub Date: June 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9967779-4-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Hollywood Books International
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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