Exciting, original update of the ripping-yarns formula.
Allen (Slaves of the Shinar, 2007) sends the 14-year-old son of Chinese immigrants into the western territories of post–Civil War America.
When Yen Tzu-lu (nicknamed Lu) hears his grandfather speaking in Chinese with a mysterious white man named Jack Straw about some kind of mission, he never dreams that he will be plucked from his Mississippi River hometown to join it. Jack, a legendary gunslinger, is leading a group of roughnecks that includes a former slave who fought in the Union army, a Mexican outlaw and ex-Confederate John MacLemore and his daughter. They’re out to reclaim a gold mine that MacLemore says belongs to him, and Lu has been hired as an explosives expert. (He’s not, but only Jack knows that.) En route, the group encounters Native American tribesmen, bullying Union soldiers, supernatural ghost-riders and a dark figure who may just be the devil himself. The harsh realities of frontier travel are slightly mitigated for Lu by the pleasures of learning to ride horses and hunt. The author clearly has a great love for old-style boy’s-adventure tales, but he doesn’t allow the genre’s tropes to keep him from trying new things. In particular, the multicultural cast of characters, while perhaps historically improbable, is refreshing, and Allen doesn’t gloss over the widespread racial prejudices of the time. Best of all, however, he knows how to tell a cracking good story.
Exciting, original update of the ripping-yarns formula.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59020-273-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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