An emotionally raw but engaging story of a woman who recognizes that her gift can help her escape.
A fierce teen soccer player fights, hard, to become one of the world’s best.
Greenfeld (Triburbia, 2012, etc.) has a custom of inserting his personal experiences into his work, be it fiction or nonfiction, so it’s a refreshing change for him to so fully occupy a very different protagonist. Our narrator, Trudy, known to all as True, is a short, tomboyish teenage girl with a character-defining purpose: She really wants to play soccer and she really wants to win, and anyone who gets in the way of that goal is a fair target. The novel largely tracks her arc to make national teams, with the ultimate goal of joining the U.S. Women’s National Team. The challenges in her troubled life include her absent mother, who died in childbirth; a father slowly losing his spirit to gambling and depression; and the Richter-scale earthquake that is her younger sister Pauline, who is deeply autistic. When the book sticks to the pitch, it’s gripping stuff that employs painful descriptions of physically grueling training, gruesome injuries, and a determined fury sparked by competition. True doesn’t exactly inspire sympathy—the girl is mean, violent, and cracked in some very specific ways. But her single-minded pursuit of her goals makes for compelling reading, barring a few distracting sidebars like the boyfriend, the frenemy rival, and a dark episode near the end that nearly derails the plot despite being largely irrelevant. Readers should also know that although it stars a young adult, this is a very adult book with some sexuality, explicit language, and violence. In spirit and tone, this novel skews closer to the Walter Tevis cult classic The Queen’s Gambit (1983), about a similarly talented and tenacious young woman, than a mere sporting adventure.
An emotionally raw but engaging story of a woman who recognizes that her gift can help her escape.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4683-1
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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