Beyond fantastical, but it keeps the reader eager to uncover its final destination.
Debut author Fentonmiller presents a novel about a man and his supernatural hat.
The reader first meets hat maker Kasper Mützenmacher in Berlin in 1923. Kasper is a feverish jazz enthusiast who likes nothing more than Duke Ellington and a glass of Bushmills. At a jazz club, Kasper meets a lively young woman named Isana, who mocks a horde of Nazis that storm the club. Her display draws the wrath of Klaus, rumored to steal women’s faces. One can only imagine what will happen to Isana when she is taken away. Kasper, though, is no ordinary hatter. Thanks to a curse passed down for generations, he’s forced into his trade. But he has access to some very peculiar headgear: a hat stolen from the Greek god Hermes that allows its wearer to transport to any conceived of location. If used incorrectly, the hat can lead users to become addicted to its powers. After Kasper uses the hat to rescue Isana, his life becomes even more perilous. But Kasper and his family’s safety are merely part of what becomes an epic, international adventure. All at once, the story is serious, fantastical, and alluringly strange. Horrors of the buildup to Nazi power mix with the idea that a family is cursed to stay in the hat business (which, as far as curses go, seems a pretty light one). Later chapters involve life in America, race relations in Detroit, and a stretched metaphor that people cannot be forced to change—much how “you’ll never make a bowler into a top hat.” The adventure stirs these elements in a way that keeps the reader guessing and intrigued about Kasper’s fate. Taking the concept of a transporting hat seriously can be difficult at times (one character is said to be “utterly powerless against the hat”); however, the book’s odd tone inevitably brings the reader to odd places. And they are places that culminate in an undeniably imaginative journey.
Beyond fantastical, but it keeps the reader eager to uncover its final destination.Pub Date: March 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62007-285-1
Page Count: 441
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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