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