THE INVERTED FOREST

Name: THE INVERTED FOREST
Author: John Dalton
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9602-8

by John Dalton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 2011

Dealing carefully with controversial material, this is a fully populated, humane yet largely unsentimental narrative of...

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An odd, absorbing follow-up to an award-winning debut distinguishes crucial degrees of humanity and affliction among the community at a Missouri summer camp where a convergence of staff and campers leads to tragedy.

In a patient display of skill, Dalton (Heaven Lake, 2004) delivers an original drama set at Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in the Ozarks, owned and managed by Schuller Kindermann, whose idiosyncratic standards and wholesale dismissal of the 1996 camp counselors set events in train. Hastily hiring a new crew, including Wyatt Huddy, 23 and suffering from a facial deformity indicating Apert syndrome, Schuller omits to tell his replacement team that for the first two weeks the camp will be filled not by children but handicapped adults from the local hospital. With measured pace Dalton depicts the impact of coping with 104 variously disturbed patients on the under-equipped counselors and staff, including Christopher Waterhouse, a seemingly charming but possibly flawed counselor. When camp nurse Harriet Foster realizes Christopher’s true nature she calls on Wyatt for help, an action that will have consequences down the decades. Dalton’s expert control of his material is impressive. His conclusion, set 15 years later, tenderly resolves both the moral and personal aspects of the story.

Dealing carefully with controversial material, this is a fully populated, humane yet largely unsentimental narrative of lingering impact.

Pub Date: July 19, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4165-9602-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HEX

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.

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A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.

Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.

Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.

Pub Date: March 31, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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GIRL IN TRANSLATION

by Jean Kwok ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2010

A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at...

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An iteration of a quintessential American myth—immigrants come to America and experience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but education and pluck ultimately lead to success.

Twelve-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong and feel lucky to get out before the transfer to the Chinese. Because Mrs. Chang’s older sister owns a garment factory in Brooklyn, she offers Kimberly’s mother—and even Kimberly—a “good job” bagging skirts as well as a place to live in a nearby apartment. Of course, both of these “gifts” turn out to be exploitative, for to make ends meet Mrs. Chang winds up working 12-hour–plus days in the factory. Kimberly joins her after school hours in this hot and exhausting labor, and the apartment is teeming with roaches. In addition, the start to Kimberly’s sixth-grade year is far from prepossessing, for she’s shy and speaks almost no English, but she turns out to be a whiz at math and science. The following year she earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Her academic gifts are so far beyond those of her fellow students that eventually she’s given a special oral exam to make sure she’s not cheating. (She’s not.) Playing out against the background of Kimberly’s fairly predictable school success (she winds up going to Yale on full scholarship and then to Harvard medical school) are the stages of her development, which include interactions with Matt, her hunky Chinese-American boyfriend, who works at the factory, drops out of school and wants to provide for her; Curt, her hunky Anglo boyfriend, who’s dumb but sweet; and Annette, her loyal friend from the time they’re in sixth grade. Throughout the stress of adolescence, Kimberly must also negotiate the tension between her mother’s embarrassing old-world ways and the allurement of American culture.

A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at the heartstrings.