Mary Shelley’s horror classic is a story meant to be illustrated. With language so richly vivid, readers can’t help but picture the horrors that emerge from her sharpened quill. What young reader wouldn’t want to see Dr. Frankenstein, reeling from the loss of his mother, patch together a quilt of human body parts? Whittling down the story to its most basic elements, Wagner achieves much success in adapting the slim volume with a good mix of action and emotion. Paired to Kumar’s haunting artwork, the adaptation will transport readers into the eeriest reaches of Frankenstein’s memory. The urgent pace of the original lends itself to comic format, and the illustrator runs with it: The muted palette evokes a spooky atmosphere, and, while most of the gore happens behind the scenes, his depiction of the creature is adequately grotesque. The edition includes an introduction to the author at its outset and an endnote about body snatching in the 1800s. A satisfyingly haunting introduction to a masterwork of English literature, likely to inspire further interest in all things Frankenstein. (Graphic classic. 10 & up)
Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-93-80028-24-8
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
Despite its few plotting flaws, a curiously satisfying little work.
A short, quirky debut novel, not altogether convincing at times but certainly original.
Beginning at the end of the story, Mr. Porter convinces his psychiatrist that it’s vital for him to drive to Italy from his home in London. After he arrives, memory unfolds, and the strange story of Mr. Porter and the brothers Jones is revealed. One day while walking home from the grocer, Mr. Porter notices a pretty young woman obviously waiting for someone. Later in the evening he notices a man in the same spot, also waiting. He tells the stranger not to bother, the woman has gone, and so the distressed young man invites Mr. Porter for a beer. And also for an intimate story. The young woman, Lilac, is his mistress—and also his sister-in-law. The characters in the ensuing drama—Lilac and Jerome, the two lovers; and Joshua and Beatrice, the spouses—through one means or another (usually contrived and forced) seek Mr. Porter out for advice. Which is an odd choice given Mr. Porter’s temperament: as an obsessional-compulsive (relating to his bowel movements), he is not only wary of strangers but usually disdainful. Wealthy and secretive, prone to bouts of mania and depression, he would seemingly be the last person capable of giving good counsel but is surprisingly adept at it, no doubt due to his own years of psychiatric treatment. As they all secretly come to tell their side of the story, Mr. Porter’s psychiatrist fears his patient may be slipping into a delusional state, what with all these unbelievable tales of the Jones’s he brings her. Are they real? Imagined? Mr. Porter falls in love with the troubled Lilac and obsesses about her being a dangerous woman, either to herself or others. His intuition about her will prove tragically true.
Despite its few plotting flaws, a curiously satisfying little work.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57962-031-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Mosher covers too much familiar territory to make this a really memorable debut, but it contains enough good things to whet...
Predictable but often moving first novel about a boy's coming-of-age summer in Montana.
Kyle Richards has been in love with the Big Sky country for most of his 14 years. His father was born and grew up in Montana; Cole Richards, his grandfather, still lives there. From books, atlases, films, and every other source he can lay hands on, Kyle has fashioned a larger-than-life idea of the state that makes his own native New York seem drab and overdomesticated. Kyle yearns to go West, so as a birthday present his parents give him a bus ticket and permission to spend the summer with Grandfather Cole. It doesn't take long for reality to put a damper on romanticism. Kyle arrives late at night to find no one waiting to meet him in the bleak and deserted bus terminal. Tired and a bit scared, the boy is temporarily stranded. Grandfather Cole was supposed to be there, but he had other things on his mind—namely, booze and women. Kyle quickly learns this is standard operating procedure for his grandfather, who soon hauls him off to the Six Point Saloon to meet an array of unsettling types. Among them are Darla and Dell Fishtrapper, lively, hefty, morally untrammeled Sioux maidens, both entranced with Grandfather Cole. In the succeeding weeks, Kyle is shaken and sobered by a series of hard knocks: a near-drowning, a beating at the hands of a mean-spirited bully, and a violently hormonal response to a local beauty. Most of all, however, he experiences Cole Richards, last of the real Montana men, from whom he learns a variety of lessons. Some are beneficial, some are not; none are easy.
Mosher covers too much familiar territory to make this a really memorable debut, but it contains enough good things to whet the appetite for his next.Pub Date: April 30, 2001
ISBN: 1-56792-146-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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