A nice diversion, forgettable but fun: it has some great moments but tries to be a little too cute for comfort.
A burnt-out lawyer goes looking for a nun and finds a life instead, thanks to second-novelist Kokoris (The Rich Part of Life, 2000).
Sam Gamett is no Oliver Wendell Holmes: He rarely gets up before noon, and he likes to start his cocktail hour no later than three. When he married the ugly but wealthy daughter of the managing partner of Chicago’s biggest law firm, Sam felt pretty sure he could afford to take life easy. But disaster eventually struck: his wife went on a diet, lost 80 pounds, and dumped Sam overnight. For a while, he made a show of working at a small practice of his own (representing hypochondriacs, malingerers, and exhibitionists), but he was already fed up with the law by the time a disgruntled client burst into his office and tried to shoot him. While recovering, Sam started watching television’s Sister North, a nun who preached and offered advice to callers. And so now, unable to make sense of his own life, Sam jumps into his car and heads for Appleton, Wisconsin, to track down Sister North. When he arrives in Appleton, however, Sam learns that Sister North has disappeared some weeks ago and no one knows when she’ll return. Some say she’s doing mission work in Africa, others that she’s raising money for the mentally retarded in Pennsylvania. Sam cools his heels for a while in Appleton (a kind of open-air asylum for eccentrics on the order of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces), where he manages to dry himself out, survive a tornado, and fall in love. By the time Sam actually meets Sister North, he doesn’t really need her help. Perhaps he never did.
A nice diversion, forgettable but fun: it has some great moments but tries to be a little too cute for comfort.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-27540-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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BOOK REVIEW
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