A whimsical tale with plenty of zaniness that revolves around a sentimental and philosophical core.
A debut novel follows a teenager and his curious involvement with celestial beings.
Josh, a lover of marijuana, disc golf, and Internet pornography, seems an unlikely guy to be recruited for anything, let alone an important mission from the gods. This is, however, exactly what happens. With a need for a mortal to hide the “Secret Knowledge picked from the Tree of Life,” Thoth, the “divine librarian and scribe of the gods,” feels he has found his man. As Thoth explains in a committee meeting that includes Athena and Eshu, “Our goal is to find the individual on Earth who is LEAST likely to benefit from possessing the Secrets; I think we have succeeded.” Persuading the high school student to accept the task, which involves holding a number of CDs that contain “all of the world’s secret knowledge” in exchange for “the best ganja bud you can imagine,” proves to be no challenge at all. Josh has other concerns. He hates school (“It’s not that he wasn’t smart, but the material they tried to teach him was wretchedly boring”). And as his dementia-suffering grandfather comes to stay with the family, Josh can only escape to his favorite distractions for so long. Problems arise, however, when Thoth decides he likes to hang out with the boy and Josh develops an interest in learning about the knowledge he protects. If the idea of an ancient Egyptian deity befriending a high school slacker sounds silly, that’s because it is. Free-wheeling throughout, the narrative nevertheless tackles serious topics in an unapologetically playful manner. Discussing enlightenment, Thoth explains that “One of the incontrovertible truths is that nature abhors a vacuum, and the most abhorrent vacuum of all is an empty cranium.” The lesson occurs while he and Josh are settled in for an evening of video games. Though the description of Dionysus as a “snot-licking drunk” may not be humorous to all readers, the comedy is a vehicle for the characters to build relationships, which in the end manage to be touching. Everyone needs a friend; so what if Josh’s happens to have the head of a bird and comes bearing “unbelievable” weed?
A whimsical tale with plenty of zaniness that revolves around a sentimental and philosophical core.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62901-079-3
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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