An intriguing but uneven ballot tale.
The FBI discovers millions of illicit election ballots for a presidential candidate in a woman’s car in this political satire.
In Sumter County, Alabama, the FBI finds—apparently while changing the tire of a woman’s car—about 7 million ballots cast for Joe Biden as well as 11 books of first-class stamps adorned with portraits of Elvis Presley. The car is named—it’s a Nissan Altima—in reports, but the owner of the car is not, referred to repeatedly as the “Alleged Woman” in Taylor’s madcap tale. The “Bogus Biden Ballot case” quickly becomes a national media sensation, and the relevant authorities become obsessed with the microscopically insignificant counting and recounting of the massive dump of ballots to determine an exact quantity. New York lawyer Rudy Gullibilliani—this revision of Rudy Giuliani’s name is an example of the author’s vaudevillian humor—enters the fray, first to investigate electoral fraud but later to represent the Alleged Woman. Rudy is worried President Trumpet will go bankrupt, leaving the attorney high and dry. The Centers for Disease Control, led by Herman “Hiccup” Healthman, orders the quarantining of the ballots on the grounds that they may be infected with Covid-19. As a result, the Proud Bananas, a national political organization skeptical of the virus, offers to step in: “We may just ride down to Alabama and eat them, just to prove how silly this pandemic stuff is. I mean, haven’t you had a teeny cold before? Did you go crying to a senator and stuffing masks down everyone’s throats when you did?”
The story’s premise is thought-provoking and amusing. And one can credit Taylor with the literary virtue of consistency—the farcical tone of the book never abates, not even for the length of a dependent clause. But the brief novel—under 150 pages—feels considerably longer, an often bumpy read. The entire work is presented as a series of breathless press releases written in an absurdist style and sometimes feels like a catalog of Dad stories, more goofy than clever, let alone raucously funny. One can’t help but feel a sense of familiarity while reading the tale. Consider this caricature of Donald Trump: “This is goo for America, this is goo for freedom. It will keep America Great. Some things have been accomplished, some very goo things, very goo. And I’m going to take this special occasion to tell you that I’m a very goo loser. A very goo one. I understand a lot. People are amazed that I’m not a psychiatrist.” One can argue, in the author’s defense, that he chose a forbidding genre—during genuinely surreal times, it isn’t easy to top the parody that reality provides. While there are some humorous passages in these pages, Taylor ultimately offers readers a compilation of silly jokes half-heartedly crammed into something that looks like a novel at first glance but upon closer scrutiny is a litany of one-liners.
An intriguing but uneven ballot tale.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60489-284-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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