A work of juvenile fiction with heavy-handed messaging that’s mitigated by intriguing artwork and imaginative modern and...
In this children’s fantasy by author/illustrators de Bruin (Losing David, 2018, etc.) and Decker, an arrogant cat goes on a journey of self-discovery, hoping to regain her lost nine lives.
Feline narrator Rosebud is a reckless bully who’s used up all of her lives by her second birthday. Her only hope is to seek out the Cat Lady Goddess and ask that they be restored. The Goddess agrees to do so only if Rosebud finds and recovers some precious treasures that were stolen by the Supreme Golden Cobra Empress. This means a trip to an action-packed “Otherworld.” With a benign, winged dog as her guide, Rosebud, her sisters, and brother embark on a perilous odyssey, variously threatened and befriended by the authors’ unusual pantheon of strange beings—among them, a giant, fire-spouting, prayer-offering mantis; and a tusked ogre with a sentient rowboat. Along the way, Rosebud (and readers) receives didactic character-building lessons: An ugly toad is poisoning the Otherworld with his Rumor Mill, churning out and posting gossip; a kindly Bigfoot-type character points out that the world would be boring if everyone was alike (“we’ve been given the perfect bodies to suit who we are and what we need”); Rosebud discovers she can feel empathy and love and learns not to “judge someone…because they remind you of someone who did something bad to you.” Rosebud’s redemptive enlightenment isn’t handled with a great deal of subtlety. However, the authors do couch their lessons in an absorbing, vivid framework of mythological elements, illustrated with full-page collage art that offers a striking mix of realistic and fantasy imagery. It’s worth noting, however, that the mild English expletive “bloody” is used frequently, and the troublemaking toad describes a snake princess and her sisters as dressing like “street walkers,” without elaboration.
A work of juvenile fiction with heavy-handed messaging that’s mitigated by intriguing artwork and imaginative modern and mythological elements.Pub Date: April 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994664-1-4
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Mediacs
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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