A delightful jumble of jungle creatures, two-legged and four-legged alike.
Hippos shrink, zebras speak French, and love heals all wounds in Stein’s debut novel.
Mila is a writer who’s frustrated to be battling cancer instead of helping to save endangered species in Africa. In order to remain positive through rounds of chemotherapy and pain, she imagines the adventures of her stuffed hippo, Po, and Petal, a woman who adopts the hippo after finding her in a blue valise. Po has the power to “hippomorphosize,” or grow and shrink at will. The hippo has a plan to save the world, using kisses and her own love for a zebra named Tree, who was raised by hippos. However, Po’s mother is missing somewhere back in Africa. Petal is an American artist who escaped from Hollywood and now keeps herself sober with Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She has a loving British partner, an estranged British brother-in-law, and a crush on an unreliable Californian man. She and Po, with the help of their many friends, work together to heal each other’s broken spots as they search for the hippo’s mother. In their adventures, Mila finds new reasons to keep going. This whimsical tale of magical realism is not for everyone. For example, some readers may be taken aback at a world in which creatures can change their sizes by chanting nonsense words or where the silliness of hippo-administered “Kiss Therapy” exists alongside realistic loneliness and loss. But for those with looser imaginations, the book will strike just the right balance between humor and pathos. The narrator’s voice has a confidence that feels no need to explain itself, and the characters are alive with wit and occasional wisdom. Sometimes their philosophizing outstays its welcome, but in a book with talking animals that use “Lunar Ears” to find each other and start new fashions in Los Angeles, it’s hard to call anything out of place. From beginning to end, the story embodies Mila’s philosophy: “Things just happen. What we do with them defines us.”
A delightful jumble of jungle creatures, two-legged and four-legged alike.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965553-0-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Fuze Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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