A promising first collection, showcasing a new writer’s significant powers of invention—though he seems merely to be tuning...
The sky is falling, the world is ending, and Rumpelstiltskin is going to pieces in this intriguing but unfulfilling debut collection.
Arkansas-based Brockmeier won a 2000 O. Henry Award for the opening story, “These Hands,” about a 34-year-old male babysitter who grows ever more obsessed with the 18-month-old girl in his charge. The other ten tales have similarly quirky approaches, focusing on unusual living conditions or supernatural states of being. In “The Ceiling,” for example, a man has to cope with his wife’s new affair and the fact that the sky is slowly descending toward the earth. The narrator of “The Passenger” was born and raised, and now lives, in a never-landing airplane. “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” portrays half of the well-known villain—literally one half of his body—living out a quiet life in contemporary America, eating lunch in parks and working at a department store. Brockmeier’s habitual strategy is to concoct a weird condition and then explore it in detail, but only in a few instances do we get the rise and fall of action—as in “Apples,” about a man who experiences his first kiss and sees his teacher killed by a flying bucket on the same school day; or the title story, about a middle-aged librarian who finds redemption in an eccentric old patron. Brockmeier’s scenarios are entertaining, even if reading them occasionally feels like eating at a themed restaurant—nice decorations, but predictable once you get the idea. He has a tendency to overdescribe (“A smile evanesced across her face,” “the sky grew bright with afternoon,” etc.), but in moments of high effect he puts on quite a brilliant show. The conversation between half of Rumpelstiltskin and the women at a local auxiliary club is an outstanding piece of comedy.
A promising first collection, showcasing a new writer’s significant powers of invention—though he seems merely to be tuning his instrument for future work.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42134-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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