A new take on the gumshoe tale that’s as substantive as it is enjoyable.
A mystery novel explores animal rights, human responsibility, and the soul itself.
De Anima is Aristotle’s extended discussion of the human soul. Yet in it, the philosopher also allows for the possibility that animals, with their seemingly rich emotional lives, have souls too. Or so argues Professor Edward Stathakis, the lead in Costanzo’s (The Grand Junction, 2014, etc.) latest book. Edward presents his thesis in an undergraduate philosophy class. Yet when his college’s jackrabbit mascot unexpectedly vanishes a few days later, fears arise that his students have taken Edward’s argument a bit too seriously. The rabbit’s disappearance is just the first of a string of crimes that all seem to contribute to one noble goal: the liberation or protection of newly ensouled birds and beasts. And to save his job—or at least justify his teaching style—Edward embarks on a quest to reveal the perpetrator. (This notion that students might take a philosophy class so seriously is as quaint as it is attractive.) Edward, a bit of a fusty academic, is more George Smiley than Sam Spade, but that’s part of the fun. Like John le Carré before him, Costanzo knows that an improbable hero is often more likely to hold readers’ attention, and Edward does just that. Costanzo is a seasoned author; a journalist with decades of experience and a novelist with multiple books behind him, he knows how to spin a tale. His characters are clearly differentiated and well-developed, and his dialogue is crisp and believable. But his engrossing project holds together so effectively at least in part because its central philosophical and theological questions are so well-defined. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Costanzo’s book is shot through with big, abstract ideas that give the gratifying mystery structure and intellectual weight.
A new take on the gumshoe tale that’s as substantive as it is enjoyable.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-9293-3
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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