A somber revenge tale, but fronted by a protagonist both absorbing and sublimely complicated.
A debut thriller tells the story of Shame, who survives a savage beating with a scarred, physically stronger body and a new mindset to seek justice for all who are persecuted.
School life for Shame, whose birth name is never revealed, was abominable. Peers’ baseless animosity and relentless torment seem derived from Shame’s androgyny. When Shame embraces the students’ epithet, The Shamed, by spray-painting it on a jacket, the resultant pummeling and mutilation leave the protagonist near death. Awakening from a coma two years later, the now-adult is heavily scarred and, as an unwitting guinea pig in experimental surgery, has most bones fused with a “special metal.” Though asserting an unemotional state, Shame heads to Baltimore to find Cassidy “Cassie” Peterson, an old friend and possible love in rehab at the time of Shame’s attack. Chance sightings of two of Shame’s assailants, however, open the door for retribution and torture. Shame even murders someone to avoid identification, and the trip to see Cassie eventually turns into evasion, especially with feds investigating those tortures. Shame makes a few friends but mostly encounters degenerates, the worst of the bunch turning out to be gangsters who think Shame killed one of their own. Finding Cassie and working up the courage to approach her takes a back seat when the thugs kidnap someone Shame’s just maybe grown to care about. Though Shame’s first-person perspective assumes reader sympathy is a certainty, some may not empathize so easily. The initial murder isn’t justified like the assailants’ comeuppance, and a few good people, by mere association, get the brunt of Shame’s intermingling with violent people. The protagonist, however, is fascinating, metal-infused bones putting Shame on the same level as bigger foes. Similarly, gender in the story is rightly meaningless when it comes to defining a person, even if nearly every male character is repulsive. The plot, at times, hits a standstill, readers essentially waiting as Shame decides when finally to reunite with Cassie. Nevertheless, Shame, who develops an attachment or two, is markedly less cold as the story progresses, while an implication of psychological illness—hearing voices of the dead—opens avenues of story possibilities. The cliffhanger ending is nothing short of electric.
A somber revenge tale, but fronted by a protagonist both absorbing and sublimely complicated.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-578-16606-3
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Dreams Into Reality Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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