A rambling and lackluster second effort by Shepherd (Henry’s List of Wrongs, 2002), fleshed out with predictable situations...
An unexciting midwestern version of All the King’s Men follows a young man’s struggle to uncover (and conceal) the shady truths about his dead father.
Cleveland has its fair share of shady grafters in City Hall—and Joe Way should know. His father, Joseph Sr. is the mayor, and Joe Jr. is helping Dad fight off challenger Lester Ratcovic in one of the sleaziest municipal campaigns since Richard Daley went on to his great reward. A onetime college football star who got his start in politics by setting up a new Browns franchise in Cleveland, Joe Jr. is Assistant DA and heir presumptive to the Way dynasty. He is also a self-righteous prig keenly sensitive to the failings of others and not above playing dirty when it suits his purposes. When a teenaged girl comes to him with a story of how she was sexually harassed by Ratcovic, Joe urges her to go public with her tale—and to conceal the fact that they ever met. The uproar that ensues kills Ratcovic’s campaign and erupts into full-blown scandal when the girl is found beaten to death. Does Joe have any regrets? Not at first—until he discovers that his father has been conducting a longtime affair behind his mother’s back. As if that weren’t shock enough, Joe’s father dies the very day after Joe catches him in flagrante delicto. Joe narrates his story into a tape recorder as he desperately rehearses the eulogy he’ll have to deliver at the funeral. As he struggles to make sense of his father’s life, he is helped by an older brother who has recently come out of the closet and an ex-girlfriend who works for a left-wing paper that was investigating Joe’s father. Which is better, ignorance or disillusion?
A rambling and lackluster second effort by Shepherd (Henry’s List of Wrongs, 2002), fleshed out with predictable situations and two-dimensional characters: feels flat and formulaic.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-6626-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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