by Jonathan LaPoma ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A protracted but highly readable tale of a struggling but well-meaning schoolteacher.
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A relocation to the West triggers major life changes for a soul-searching man in this novel.
This fifth volume of LaPoma’s (Hammond, 2018, etc.) loosely linked series focuses on Jay Sakovsky, a restless schoolteacher in his mid-20s who recently relocated from Buffalo, New York, to the “Promised Land” of Southern California. He did so in the hope that a change of scenery would cure his chronic anxiety. He also wants to realize his dream of becoming a successful actor, songwriter, and novelist. After arriving in Soul City, a Venice Beach–like cosmopolis north of Hollywood, Jay searches for substitute-teaching work at one of the local schools and crashes with his moody college buddy Doug. In teaching, he hopes to gain the confidence to begin auditioning in Hollywood as an actor; he also seeks to cure what he calls “the Darkness inside,” which seems to refer to chronic depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jay meets Soul City native Cody, a wealthy former biotechnology company businessman who has a major plan for education reform, which involves opening his own academy. While teaching at this new school, Jay parties, fights, dates, confronts a scoliosis diagnosis, and embarks on a “healing journey.” Over the course of this lengthy novel, Jay is revealed to be an intriguing soul to follow, and LaPoma seamlessly depicts aspects of Jay’s mental illness as well as his attempts to get successfully published. Along the way, the author effectively plays with the theme of control— specifically, Jay’s lack of it, in both his classrooms and in his personal life. Readers who are looking for less rumination and more action may find this tome to be somewhat lacking, but those who will enjoy a good character study of an educator yearning for more will be satisfied.
A protracted but highly readable tale of a struggling but well-meaning schoolteacher.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 457
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2008
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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