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SHOT-BLUE

Name: SHOT-BLUE
Author: Jesse Ruddock
ISBN: 978-1-55245-340-7

by Jesse Ruddock ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017

A moving, lyrical novel that explores the emotional pain of hardship on children.

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Poverty, youth, and longing collide on an isolated Canadian island in Ruddock's searing debut novel.

Rachel and her 11-year-old son, Tristan, are alone in Canada’s rugged north, working odd jobs when they can but most often isolating themselves on a small, wild island where Rachel’s father kept a hunting cabin. Trying to provide for her son, Rachel begins sleeping with local boatman Keb in exchange for money. After winter drives them to a town on a neighboring island, Rachel wanders too far from their small cabin and perishes in the cold, only being found when the ice on which she died thaws and she is washed to shore. This leaves Tristan alone in a harsh world that doesn’t show much compassion to the boy beyond getting him a job at a resort being built on the island he and his mother once called home. There, Tristan becomes just another nameless worker, all the while harboring a sense of loss for the place that was once his refuge. When a young girl named Tomasin arrives for the summer, she picks Tristan out and develops a crush that pushes both of them beyond their emotional limits. In haunting prose, the author has created a moving and tense look at what becomes of children when they aren’t or can’t be cared for and must fend for themselves. It explores the depths of human emotion and the limits we struggle to overcome.

A moving, lyrical novel that explores the emotional pain of hardship on children.

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-55245-340-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Coach House Books

Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.