Despite the utter unbelievability of every other plot element, you still end up craving one of those sandwiches.
One-half of the happiest couple on earth—or at least in the fictional Passamaquoddy, Maine—conceals her terminal diagnosis from her husband.
Despite a tortuous history of pregnancy loss, Annie and Sam have been a perfect match since high school. Well-liked in their Maine hometown, they came back after college to run a sandwich shop with a sub so popular it's a tourist attraction—the totally unhealthy and impossibly delicious "Paul Bunyan," consisting of salami, American cheese, tomatoes, onions, green peppercorns, pickles, and a mysterious sauce holding it all together. Considering the success of the couple's relationship, it's odd that they've never really learned to have a conversation—but that's what sets this kooky rom-com in motion, with additional bold plot contrivances (obscure medical conditions, family secrets, sudden personality changes, magical wealth and influence) also playing their parts. When the local doctor takes a look at Annie's lungs and tells her with tears in his eyes to get her affairs in order, she knows she must break the news to her darling Sam. But when Sam cuts her off and changes the subject, she decides not to tell him at all. Instead, she'll write him a manual on how to manage his life after she's gone. Each chapter of Medwed's first novel in 12 years starts with a quote from the manual—"Women like flowers," "Don't let your underwear become tattered," "Change the answering machine to your own voice"—and longer excerpts are also included, featuring quite a bit of urging that, as a widower, Sam seek comfort from Annie's lifelong best friend, Rachel. Though the doctor continues to insist she tell both Sam and her mother (a famous actress who's been worthless as a parent and is now, after many husbands, this doctor's girlfriend) and also to please, please consult a specialist for a second opinion, Annie sees no rush. If you're gonna die, you're gonna die.
Despite the utter unbelievability of every other plot element, you still end up craving one of those sandwiches.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64385-643-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Alcove Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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