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BRING THE RAIN

A rich, thoughtful portrait of a professor in peril both from outside influences and her own body’s betrayal.

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A woman battles a debilitating brain disease while juggling career and romance issues in this sequel.

Former journalist and educator Franklin (The Raindrop Institute, 2017) continues the saga of Dart Sommers, a 63-year-old North Carolina psychology professor and co-founder of the Raindrop Institute, a research center aimed at vanquishing global poverty. Though she tries to hide it from Classy, Susan, Lynn, and Mary Beth, her four longtime tenants and the institute’s other co-founders, Dart has been experiencing harrowing episodes of dizziness and vision problems. Whether painting on a ladder or displaying odd behavior at work, she sees the condition escalate to panic-inducing proportions. Dart’s family history has complicated her life as well. On his deathbed, her father left his home to her, but conditionally. She would unrealistically have five years to “solve poverty” or the home would be sold. The Raindrop Institute think tank was born, but it has yet to curtail civilization’s collapse. Still, the estate’s attorney deems Dart’s efforts sufficient and grants her ownership of the house, though the decision incites her guilt at not being able to do more. This feeling deepens once her symptoms become debilitating and she sees a physician, who diagnoses her with frontotemporal dementia. This changes everything, not to mention that marriage and family issues intrude on her household, and the tenants begin to leave. Her boss, Jarvis Asher “Ash” White, a widower whose wife perished from FTD, wants her to move in with him, but Dart is unsure; meanwhile, collaborating with a research student reignites the bad blood between her and a colleague. In this resonant and lucid portrayal of a woman facing dire health and job problems, the triple threat of serious work accusations, her missing cousin Ellen, and her deteriorating mental state brings Dart to the brink of a breakdown. But she remains buoyed by efforts to advance the institute’s mission with outreach efforts and Ash’s unconditional support as she declines. Alongside a somewhat grim, melodramatic narrative, Franklin imparts some intriguing, thought-provoking theories about poverty, brain function, ageism, and gender equality (“Did she believe that men alone could save the world? If so, they’d had centuries of male leadership to craft a better world, and it hadn’t worked”). In addition, the author deftly inspires interest in FTD, a “very real disease.”

A rich, thoughtful portrait of a professor in peril both from outside influences and her own body’s betrayal.  

Pub Date: May 21, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-63152-507-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly.  One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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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