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FLICKING BOOGERS IN THE WIND

Name: FLICKING BOOGERS IN THE WIND
Author: Jonathan Bricklin
ISBN: 978-1500519858

by Jonathan Bricklin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2014

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Unseemly juvenile antics and unhinged philosophical yakking abound in this boisterous magical-realist novel.
Willy Nilly, a 10-year-old boy living on the outskirts of Bumpkinville, Montana, is a neurotic motor mouth with a grandiose imagination and a penchant for collecting “lucky” pennies—a habit perhaps related to the fact that a very unlucky lightning bolt felled his father. He’s full of cosmic ambition: He wants to be cryogenically frozen and then revived when medical science has cured old age so he can travel the universe in a spaceship. But his more concrete plans tend to misfire, such as a lemonade stand that’s immediately shut down for want of a permit. Better luck comes when he meets Daffodil Peacock, a new girl in class who lives in a palace and collects her own raspberry-flavored tears. They bond over a turtle named Bruce Lee that’s able to telepathically converse with Willy. Daffodil, Bruce and Willy become fast friends, practicing karate together, engaging in debates about “the merits of structuralism versus existentialism,” and mulling “an Aristotelian proof of the proposition that modern cooking shows are eerily similar to ancient forms of alchemical practice.” None of this goes anywhere in particular; instead, Daffodil heads offstage to experience thrilling adventures that readers don’t hear much about while Willy continues to conceive unlikely projects that predictably fizzle. Bricklin has a fertile, teeming comic imagination. However, there’s not much narrative payoff to it: The novel is mainly an excuse for regaling readers with twee notions, overextended japes and drolly precocious dialogue from the mouths of babes. The latter is sophomoric but in no way childlike, unless one knows any 10-year-olds who ask for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a bedtime story. The prose seems overly pleased with its own showy erudition (“I felt like a Roman soldier being ambushed by the Germanic war chief Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest”) and sometimes mistakes verbosity (“But is my brain me or am I my brain or am I not my brain or is it the same?”) for profundity. The result often feels as pointless as the title might suggest.
A frenetic but feckless fantasia.

Pub Date: July 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-1500519858

Page Count: 134

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.