A collection that may sometimes be tough for the tenderhearted, featuring a distinctive animal cast.
In this illustrated children’s book, talking animal friends have adventures, solve problems, and help others.
Livingston Cove, in upstate New York, is home to some “very special animals” who love to do good works. At first, the gang has three members: Ella Bella, a calico cat; Mr. McGovern, a dog; and the terrier next door, Paddy. They meet Tank, a pit bull, who’s hungry and alone after his owners abandoned him. They listen to his story and take care of him until new, better owners are found who already have a pit bull puppy. The four friends then retrieve a bracelet from a thieving crow; set off to the Great Lakes in search of adventure but rethink it after learning of possible dangers (“being eaten was not an adventure at all”); and meet the fifth and final member of the gang, Duke, a military dog. He’s seen many scary and sad things and can’t remember where he comes from. Then the five friends chase off an apple-stealing fox and help Sally, a mean, abandoned cat, find a new home with a kind farmer. In her debut, author Davis sometimes goes to unexpectedly dark places, although each story ends happily. Tank’s first owner, for instance, “had left him to die”; Duke doesn’t want to remember his past because “it hurts too much”; and Sally was left behind by uncaring owners, which “was terrible to her.” But the stories do a nice job of capturing the characters’ individual personalities. The thieving crow in “Ella Bella’s Lost Charm,” for instance, shows his mischievousness by first denying he has the bracelet, then ungraciously bargaining for it: “Okay, I found your precious bracelet; what will you give me for it?” Ella Bella replies, “I will not come up the tree and eat you…!” The attractive, uncredited illustrations successfully help to tell the story, as when they show Tank’s wartime activities in thought balloons.
A collection that may sometimes be tough for the tenderhearted, featuring a distinctive animal cast.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6904-2
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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