Neither rich in clues nor a milestone in the annals of feminism, but still highly readable.
It took an ugly divorce to get homeroom cupcake queen Bitsy Burnside aboard the feminist boat, but now it’s full speed ahead. Using the proceeds of her settlement and a healthy inheritance from a rich great-uncle, she’s bought a huge old dormered Victorian house that she plans to renovate into a corporate bed-and-breakfast. And she’s hired carpenters named Jacqueline and Henrietta, a sheetrock installer named Evaline, and an electrician named Thomasina to work on the project under the rather inept direction of general contractor Sandra Anderson. Now she wants to hire Shelley Nowack and her best friend and next-door neighbor Jane Jeffry (Mulch Ado About Nothing, 2000, etc.) as decorators. Shelley’s all for it. Not only will she earn some pin money, but decorator’s credentials will allow her to browse the fabulous Merchandise Mart, home to over a thousand different showerheads. Jane’s more skeptical, especially since the worksite has already been the target of several nasty pranks, including a bag of frozen shrimp shoved into the ductwork and a fake bomb in a toolbox. But when Sandra’s corpse in found in the basement, Jane’s enthusiasm returns—not for renovating Bitsy’s place, but for solving the murder. Fueled by a combination of self-confidence and imperturbable naïveté (and ignoring the warnings of her sometime squeeze, Detective Mel Van Dyne), she interviews suspect after suspect until she stumbles upon the truth.
Neither rich in clues nor a milestone in the annals of feminism, but still highly readable.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97736-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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