Not quite a Texas gusher but offers a steady stream of entertainment and intrigue.
A young man sets out on a quest for wealth and recognition in this promising novel by Mooney.
Junior Peck was born into neither luck nor money. Growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, the son of a drunken construction worker, Junior’s life changes when a deadly tornado hits town. The storm topples a wall in the new gymnasium, killing two girls. Junior’s father, Leland, is held accountable and jailed for substandard workmanship. Junior’s mother, Daisy, struggles to cope with the shame. She sends her son off to Weldon Christian Camp, hoping to show him a bigger, better life. Surrounded by privileged kids of successful businessmen, Junior is immediately out of place. They sneer at his clothes and haircut and shun him at the Saturday night dance. He leaves the camp, resentment festering, and swears that he will become rich in order to command respect. Returning home to find his mother in an asylum, he heads to the one place he can realize his dream: Texas during the oil boom. Hanging out in rowdy wildcatter bars, he learns every intricate scam. He becomes an ace con man and inveigles his way into the heart of Priss, the daughter of a rich lumberyard owner, to whom he proposes. Using the most despicable of methods, he amasses wealth and property, but will his machinations be exposed? The novel charts other aspects of the oil boom, most significantly, the construction of the Grand Petroleum Shannon Hotel on Galveston Bay. On occasion, this feels like an unnecessary digression, bringing in a glut of characters that the author doesn’t fully develop. The actor Howard Hughes drops in and out of the plot, as does Mary Martin, adding little value. The narrative is, nevertheless, highly devourable, its key ingredient being a liberal sprinkling of dry Texan humor: “Although Bobby was rather good-looking...the girls realized he was about as useless as tits on a bull.”
Not quite a Texas gusher but offers a steady stream of entertainment and intrigue.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-98-641500-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Kiddrose
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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