Entertainingly amusing while also showing sensitivity to children’s complex emotional lives.
An 8-year-old English boy travels by spaceship with a dapper lizard and a troll in this children’s fantasy novel.
Oscar William Tyler of Surbiton, England, discovers a large, talking, pipe-smoking lizard in his garden, dressed in “a shirt, waistcoat, trousers, and bedroom slippers.” The creature reminds Oscar of Grumps, his beloved, recently deceased grandfather. The lizard reveals that his name is “Larry the Lounge Lizard.” Over the coming weeks, the two enjoy several chats, and Oscar is excited to meet Larry’s troll friend, Nicholas Fijmeister, who Larry says is “decent by troll standards…he doesn’t very often try to kill his relatives.” The three take trips in the garden’s apple tree (which magically turns into a spaceship) to Larry’s home world, Tarastaria, which is inhabited by an array of creatures, including trolls like Nicholas, monkeys, humanlike “sloggles,” and monkeylike “gonks.” They’re ruled over by the tyrant Emperor Brummelfritz, whom Larry—an anti-royalist, like Grumps—calls “Emperor Bumface.” Oscar is shocked by the emperor’s cruelty, which includes the slated public execution of an innocent gonk, so he and his friends concoct a daring rescue that could bring democracy to Trolland. After some time back home, Oscar gets a new perspective on his experiences and his grief; his understanding mother says, “Maybe we all somehow find another world to inhabit in order to cope.” Clark’s debut provides silly humor that will appeals to kids’ love of the grotesque, but it also deftly brings out Oscar’s grief over his parents’ divorce and, especially, Grumps’ death; at one point, Oscar compares the latter to “a knife thrust into his heart.” The resemblances between Larry and Grumps are subtle but definite, and young readers can make connections between Oscar’s wish for continued closeness with Grumps and his eagerness to have Larry in his life. Another strength is the fact that Oscar’s parents aren’t clueless or critical; they make a real effort to connect with their son and understand his point of view, which Oscar notices and appreciates. The side characters, too, are well-drawn and contribute to the story.
Entertainingly amusing while also showing sensitivity to children’s complex emotional lives.Pub Date: March 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-976350-02-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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