A manic, combustive novel about complex systems and the motivations that power them.
A young man’s life is disrupted by the appearance of a preternaturally gifted co-worker in Daulton’s new-adult novel.
Nineteen-year-old slacker Dean Sardelle resents having to work in the family pet store, Fred’s Fish, particularly after his sister, Sheila—his parents’ favorite—goes off to college. Business is not booming, and part of the reason may be the decision by Dean’s father, Mort, to specialize in less-popular fish, such as mackerel, cod, and carp. Sheila’s tuition is costing the family a small fortune, and Dean’s seriously ill mother’s medical bills are a burden, as well. That’s why Midas Murphy is such a godsend. The strange old man walks into the shop one day looking for a job, and it turns out that he’s a master salesman. He helps Dean modernize the business, which drastically increases their profits. Dean gets to share in the credit for Midas’ ideas, and his life improves materially because of it—he even winds up with a company car—but Midas continues to expand in new, weirder directions. Dean soon finds himself in charge of staffing and managing a factory producing a pesticide spray for a microscopic “miter” bug that’s he’s pretty sure Midas made up. Things get even stranger when Midas establishes a connection to a new religion centered on the bug, the First Davis Church of the Miter, which quickly proves itself to be a cult. Dean strikes out on his own with Sardelle’s Sanity Secure, a company in the business of rescuing minors from the cult’s clutches. Soon he’s tasked with finding and rescuing cult recruit Mary Agneau—despite the fact that he’s not at all qualified to do such work. Dean has never been a self-starter, but now he’ll have to rise to the occasion in order to fix the very problems that he helped to create.
Over the course of this book, Daulton employs a prose style that is consistently spirited and sharp, and it ably captures Dean’s angst and irony-ridden view of the increasingly strange happenings around him: “I didn’t mind getting high and playing Xbox from time to time, but that’s a lot different from getting high and hanging around a 250-pound cult leader who is watching your every move. I knew because I’d tried it my second night there, attempting to fit in, and it was awful.” There are some moments of casual misogyny in the narrative that have the effect of making Dean less likable than he should be, but overall, his situation remains a compelling one throughout the novel. Midas’ endless, reckless, exponential entrepreneurship makes for a clever comment on late capitalism, and the reader’s anxiety will grow as quickly as the Sardelles’ profits do. The novel, with its cartoonish, dark didacticism, is reminiscent in some ways of Roald Dahl’s works for adults. Overall, the book is perhaps slightly overlong at more than 370 pages, but the storytelling skills on display here will be sure to keep the reader glued to the page.
A manic, combustive novel about complex systems and the motivations that power them.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Daulton Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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