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VENUS AS A BOY

Name: VENUS AS A BOY
Author: Luke Sutherland
ISBN: 1-58234-399-3

by Luke Sutherland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2004

Sutherland captures the violence and desperation of the marginalized: that’s where his strength, and promise, lies.

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For a hot-blooded, romantic outsider, growing up wild in the remote Orkney Islands north of Scotland leads to living wild in London—as a sex worker.

In his US debut, Sutherland—himself a native Orcadian—plays for us the life-story, on tape, of a fellow Orcadian dying in London. The first and stronger half of the book is set in Orkney, where D’s life is bleak: Violence at home (his dad); violence on the school bus; violence at school itself. Worse yet, to curry favor with the “shitty little two-faced bastards” he hangs out with, he puts himself down and revels in their sickening humiliation of a black kid. But there are bright moments, as when he becomes friendly with Finola—until he fails to protect her from rampaging thugs and she leaves the island (he wears her abandoned knickers to console himself). He has a brief erotic encounter, at age 12, with a Danish parachutist. And then there’s Tracy, his one real love: sex with her sparks visions of orchards and angels, visions he’ll pass on to all his future sex partners. When she rejects him, he leaves for the mainland to work as a dishwasher and pleasure his coworkers and hotel guests indiscriminately, for D is tri-sexual (as in the old joke: he’ll try anything sexual). He bares his soul in a voice that is edgy and compelling, but much of that edge disappears in the novel’s London half, where D joins a “crew of queens” in a “knocking shop” run by Radu, a former neo-Nazi from Romania. It should all be juicy, but it isn’t; Sutherland works better with a smaller canvas. Between the deluge of drugs and the distractions of the London scene (much voyeurism through a telescope), the clarity of vision fades and is swallowed up in melodrama.

Sutherland captures the violence and desperation of the marginalized: that’s where his strength, and promise, lies.

Pub Date: March 18, 2004

ISBN: 1-58234-399-3

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.