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
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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