A family drama that illustrates trauma’s reverberations beyond those directly involved.
Strong’s debut novel traces a mother-daughter bond that must be rebuilt after a life-changing tragedy.
College professors Stephen and Maya Taylor have made a lovely life for themselves, commuting from tree-lined Brooklyn to teach philosophy and English at Columbia University. As their children, Ellie and Ben, grow closer to adulthood, the family seems to hang by a thread. After years of Ellie using drugs, making mistakes, and sleeping with the wrong boys, Maya ships her away to Florida to care for an old friend’s child. Maya, an unmothered mother who coped with the pressures of parenting by reading, locking herself in her office, and running the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan for what seems like “half the day,” no longer sleeps with her husband. Stephen’s patience is tried by Ben’s announcement that he's giving up his soccer scholarship and taking a break from college. The novel alternates between Ellie in 2011 and Maya in 2013, a before-and-after exploration of what tragedy and mistakes can do to families and friendships. Ellie’s bad habits follow her to Florida and result in irrevocable loss. The accident, which is not elaborated on until the final pages, seems anticlimactic after being alluded to throughout the novel. Though Ellie’s mistake is the lynchpin of the book, most of the story unpacks Maya’s life—her absent mother, her emotionally unstable father, her career, her marriage, her closest friendship, and a web of relationships with graduate students. Ellie’s brief but sweet relationship with her mother’s friend and former student Annie is warmly drawn but leaves readers wishing Ellie was the subject of the same deep character analysis Maya received.
A family drama that illustrates trauma’s reverberations beyond those directly involved.Pub Date: March 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-168-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
