A winner of a first novel, filled with southern-style zingers and funny folks.
Got a buck?
Then head to Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, and see what it can buy at the Bottom Dollar Emporium—before another damn megamonster-mall springs up in an okra patch. And make sure you say howdy to the Bottom Dollar Girls: Mavis, who owns it, and Elizabeth Polk, who works there with Attalee, a dotty, ancient widow who dresses like Shirley Temple even when it isn’t Halloween, her favorite holiday. But judging by the décor at the Bottom Dollar, the last day of October is right around the corner. The paper skeletons and the moaning-and-groaning machine oughta spark the righteous wrath of the Baptists—and if not, the Eyes of Terror gumballs sure as hell will. Elizabeth, the younger, just sighs and gets on with it. Retailing is in her blood: she’s the daughter of Insane Dwayne, whose rent-to-own business featured some of the most obnoxious commercials ever made. But it made him a fortune and snagged him a trailer-park trophy wife named Taffy, who gets on Elizabeth’s last nerve. Or maybe she’s jumpy on account of Clip Jenkins breaking her heart with that Dear Jane letter he wrote on the back of a Hardee’s bag and stuck under her windshield wiper. There’s nary a replacement in sight until Mrs. Tobias, glove-wearing, prissified expert on all things genteel, introduces her to Timothy Hollingsworth, a local boy turned born-again Buddhist who wears a sheet most days and meditates. What’s that? Elizabeth explains that they “like to sit real still and keep their minds blank, like an Etch-A-Sketch after it’s been shook up.” Romantic complications, a family secret or two, and a pitched battle with the corporate-rich Super Saver Store that’s bent on moving into Cayboo Creek and shutting down the Bottom Dollar keep the story chugging along—and there’s more to come in promised sequels featuring the Bottom Dollar Girls.
A winner of a first novel, filled with southern-style zingers and funny folks.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5010-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings.
You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they’ve made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That’s the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own—the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It’s cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu séance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story’s advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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