An entertaining tale of misadventure that enjoyably captures a young boy’s voice.
Two young boys find friendship, adventure and an inventive way to take on a pair of bullies in first-time author Baker’s engaging novel based on his memories of growing up in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Time and place resonate in Baker’s colorful, empathetic but unsentimental tale of childhood set in 1960s New Zealand. Parents don’t hover, adults in general are inexplicable beings better to be avoided, radios outnumber TV sets, cellphones and the Internet are nowhere to be found, and play is what you invent, indoors and out. In this first-person narrative—with one slip into third person—the unnamed young narrator’s life is turned upside down by his new best friend, Wingnut, whose imagination and unintentional penchant for trouble lead to one adventure after another, often accompanied by scrapes and bruises. A neighborhood outsider, 10-year-old Wingnut—so named for his “big, sticky-out ears”—wears old, ill-fitting clothes and black rubber gumboots “with the tops turned down.” The boys become friends after Wingnut, “playing by himself as usual,” breaks his leg in a fall and the narrator helps him home. They soon bond over outdoor adventures involving a dangerous culvert, eel hunting, Dumpster diving, magpie attacks and the vicious Shulak brothers. After scary and painful encounters with the Shulaks, the boys decide to turn the tables, plotting their revenge with the aid of Wingnut’s World War II Army–themed comic book. The author maintains the integrity of the narrator’s voice throughout, recreating a child’s self-centered world with matter-of-fact observations of bodily functions, smelly shoes, juicy sneezes and other closely attended gross stuff. At one point, the narrator even steps on a long-dead, bloated hedgehog. Assumptions and perceptions are fixed until they’re not: The neighborhood “witch” draped in black turns out to be an interesting old lady with an acute sensitivity to the sun, and it turns out bullies can be stopped. But it’s still not a good idea to pee on an electric fence.
An entertaining tale of misadventure that enjoyably captures a young boy’s voice.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1426956614
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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