by Kate Racculia ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2010
Intelligent, warm-hearted and tough-minded—Racculia is a talent to watch.
Accomplished and compelling debut novel examines the consequences of a teenage pregnancy.
When his adored wife Amy, a special-effects creator, is killed in a freak accident on a movie set, 32-year-old photographer Arthur realizes how little he knew about her life before they met. A memorabilia-filled shoebox on the floor of their closet sends him from Hollywood to Ruby Falls, N.Y., where Amy’s childhood best friend Mona lives with her daughter. The girls ran away together in the spring of 1993; Mona returned in August with infant Oneida and has never said who the father is. Now, Mona runs a boarding house and bakes wedding cakes, while tenth-grader Oneida is resigned to being a “freak,” too intellectual for her small-town peers—until she discovers that classmate Eugene’s badass delinquent reputation is actually a surrealist art project, based on the mantra of his father (a forger) “that your whole life is a creation…you can use [it] to totally mess with other people’s heads.” This revelation causes Oneida to fall head over heels for Eugene, just as he planned, while Mona grapples with the unsettling memories of Amy reawakened by Arthur’s appearance at the boarding house. It takes Racculia just a few vivid setup chapters to sweep us into the thoughts and feelings of her appealing principal characters: smart, prickly Oneida; sexy, funny Eugene, who’s more vulnerable than he seems; nurturing Mona, still in Amy’s shadow 15 years after their life-changing road trip; and grieving Arthur, who needs to understand that his wife’s past was darker than he realized. The truth about Oneida’s parentage will be clear to alert readers long before Mona reveals it, but plot is not the point here. The author brilliantly captures teenage angst and uncertainty as she conveys some very grown-up truths about the choices we make and the prices we—and others—pay for them.
Intelligent, warm-hearted and tough-minded—Racculia is a talent to watch.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9230-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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