Elusive, allusive and moving—perhaps the author’s best work in this form since Legends of the Fall (1979).
The primal existential wound that festers in all Harrison’s fiction (The English Major, 2008, etc.) meets its equal, though not its master, in love.
Patsy Cline’s “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me” is the theme song for these three new novellas. Sarah, the engaging teenage heroine of the title work, has a Bible-thumping mother who does her a favor by running off and a father who’s always preoccupied by someone else. The elderly Montana cowboy with whom she has a platonic but sexually charged friendship dies on her; then she’s drugged and raped. Music and reading nurture Sarah as she plots revenge, but she’s too nice to wreak the kind of havoc often featured in Harrison’s work, and she’s rewarded with the love of a Mexican pianist/botany professor in the tentatively hopeful conclusion. The author’s insouciant alter ego drifts as usual through “Brown Dog Redux,” drinking too much and lusting after every woman he sees while remaining hopelessly infatuated with social worker Gretchen, but B.D. also gets a modestly happy ending, which he deserves. He may be incapable of planning ahead or getting a grip, but B.D. is “one of those very rare men who, for better or worse, knew exactly who he was.” Samuel, narrator of “The Games of Night,” has far more ferocious appetites; bitten by a wolf pup at age 12, he falls prey to terrifying attacks at each full moon, when he engages in violent sex and kills wild animals—humans as well, it’s hinted—with his bare hands. After 18 years “trying to run ahead of my disease” (the word werewolf is never used), Samuel finds solace with his adolescent love Emelia, though he knows he probably won’t live to 40. This dark yet radiant tale views his affliction as simply an extreme example of the human condition: “That is us in our wild play.”
Elusive, allusive and moving—perhaps the author’s best work in this form since Legends of the Fall (1979).Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1934-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
