Though ardently told, this novel takes on more issues than it can reasonably handle.
This first novel has a stronger focus on falling than rising but casts struggle in a noble light.
Four voices narrate the story, set in residential Las Vegas. Avis, 50-something, is witnessing the unexpected end of her marriage and the volatile changes in her son, Nate, who has recently returned from his third tour in Iraq and is about to become a police officer. Next we meet Roberta, a seasoned court-appointed advocate for children who ruminates on past cases, the city of Las Vegas and its rarely seen underprivileged side. Bashkim, 8 years old, lives with his baba and nene, Albanian refugees who run an ice cream truck. He loves school, his nene and his little sister, but his baba is a paranoid former political prisoner who beats his wife and makes Bashkim anxious. Finally, Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes wakes up in Walter Reed hospital, injured and traumatized after losing his best friend in Afghanistan. The pertinent details in all these lives are brutal ones, and the events that eventually bind them together, even more so. McBride has a talent for voice; her characters are easy to distinguish from each other and equally realistic, despite their dissimilarity. She's also a stickler for procedure, which can be dry but adds depth to some aspects of the tale, particularly Bashkim’s schooling and Luis’ recovery process. The theme of tragedy, specifically why bad things happen to good people and why good people can do bad things, is heavy-handed, though the novel is stocked with kind, professional, intuitive secondary characters who go a small way toward balancing out the horror. Arguably, the book's fifth protagonist is Las Vegas; many passages are bittersweet love letters to what it's like to make a regular life and raise a family there.
Though ardently told, this novel takes on more issues than it can reasonably handle.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3896-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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