A lean and fast-paced supernatural adventure tale that should leave readers eager for more from this author.
A seemingly ordinary young man finds himself at the center of some weird plots and counterplots.
Jacob “Jake” Davis, the 19-year-old main protagonist of Platz’s fiction debut, appears on the surface to be more or less unexceptional. He’s good-looking in a nondescript way, self-effacing to a fault, insecure around women, a good friend, and a hard, though indifferent worker. He toils as a salesman in a dead-end job at Phillip’s Furniture, and in his off time, he digs graves for his family’s funeral parlor business. He’s visited often by vivid, inexplicable dreams, but mostly his life as readers first encounter it looks normal. Several seemingly mundane factors combine to change that: his mysterious “nanny” Sylvana abruptly announces that after a lifetime of caring for him, she’s suddenly leaving; Harold, the hulking cemetery groundskeeper, seems to turn suddenly hostile; Jake’s weird dreams turn surreally much weirder; he and his friend Patrick find themselves in the middle of a bar fight that erupts out of nowhere; and Jill Stone, a local star TV news reporter, walks into the furniture store to make a purchase and sparks a romantic interest in Jake, whose dating life has previously been nonexistent. As these and other factors serve to first unbalance and then uproot Jake’s life, Platz deftly intersperses snippets of enigmatic narration into the account, tidbits that make it clear Jake has a strange and supernatural destiny about which he knows nothing but will soon start to learn. That this destiny is connected not only to Sylvana —who’s far more than she seems—but also to Jake’s distant and elusive father soon becomes obvious. The author quickly and sure-footedly weaves all these elements into a tale that never feels bogged down with exposition or heavy-handed proselytizing. While the dialogue throughout remains a bit stilted (even mundane Jake succumbs to a certain amount of histrionics as the story progresses), the novel offers vibrant imagery and excellent pacing. Platz has invented a very inviting world.
A lean and fast-paced supernatural adventure tale that should leave readers eager for more from this author.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63413-764-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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