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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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