Paull deserves kudos for a daring idea, but the resulting work is burdened by a heavy dose of explication.
An imaginative—though not wholly successful—debut in which a beehive is a dystopian society where obedience is essential.
Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, the lowest order of bee, mute and hulking and ugly. When she cracks out of her gestation cell, she's destined to perform only one role in the hive. But high priestess Sister Sage senses something different about Flora: She can speak and reason, and Sister Sage sees a use for her mutation, reminding others that “Variation is not the same as Deformity.” Flora is brought to the nursery to tend the larvae; in another variation from the norm, royal jelly pours from her mouth to feed the babies. Soon she's promoted to Category Two, a nursery for the older grubs, where she again displays a facility beyond her lowly rank. Paull uses Flora’s unique abilities to give the reader a working knowledge of the life of a beehive, often to the detriment of character development and drama. Because she has access to the Hive Mind, she's granted access to the Queen and then serves her and reads the hive’s history in the sacred chamber. Drones pop up now and then, lazy dandies that the hive sisters service. And spiders make an ominous appearance, trading prophesies of the weather for the sacrifice of aging bees. All would be well with Flora’s progression through the ranks except that she has a dangerous secret: She has produced a baby. Though against all the rules—only the Queen can reproduce—her offspring has radical implications for the future of the hive. It's clear that Paull is using the hive as an analogy for a class-bound society, where variation is punished, but this kind of dystopian vision can only thrive when the associations to contemporary circumstances are unambiguous. Much is muddled here, primarily the reader’s connection to the heroine, who rarely transcends being a bee.
Paull deserves kudos for a daring idea, but the resulting work is burdened by a heavy dose of explication.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-233115-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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