A brilliant portrayal of a girl who’s quite aware of what she’s going through.
A troubled adolescent girl dreams of setting fire to the world.
It starts with a stabbing and ends with a conflagration, and, in between, the novel never once telegraphs where it’s going. Serial surrealist Ball (A Cure for Suicide, 2015, etc.) has been justly accused of a variety of experimental ploys, but you can’t deny that when he delivers, it’s never quite what you expected. In this stark epistolary novel, the author fully occupies the inner life of a teenage girl, Lucia Stanton, who is writing down her experiences. When we meet her, she’s in the principal’s office for stabbing a boy who touched her most treasured possession, her dead father’s Zippo lighter. “So, I said, many times I said it, don’t touch this lighter or I will kill you,” she writes. “I think because I am a girl people thought I didn’t mean it.” Lucia lives with her kindly but destitute aunt in a converted garage with an overgrown garden. She makes predictions—not telling the future, she stresses—and writes them down in The Book of How Things Will Go. She’s not as profane as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but they share a certain aimlessness and cynicism about adults that rings true. Over the course of the novel, Lucia visits her ailing mother, gets high, flunks out of school, and ultimately falls in with some disillusioned young people in an Arson Club that dares her to start a fire. She also pens a brilliant pamphlet of the same title that’s nested within the pages of her scribblings. “It takes you some years to become the person who can burn a building, so be it,” she writes. “Carry your matches in your pocket, look at the faces of those who surround you in the crowd. Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?”
A brilliant portrayal of a girl who’s quite aware of what she’s going through.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87057-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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