Nicely shaded characters and believable situations. A thoughtful variation on the usual chicks-with-guns theme.
A surprisingly rich action story by second-novelist Costello (Bag Men, 1997, written under the name of John Flood; etc.) about the manic world of a Secret Service bodyguard who tries to keep her own life in some order while protecting the welfare of an elected dolt.
Vi Asplund comes from nowhere special—the little town of Center Effing, New Hampshire. The daughter of an insurance-claims adjuster, Vi used to accompany her father on business trips to disaster scenes and at an early age got accustomed to looking at bad situations with a cold eye—perfect training for the Secret Service. After a boring stint in the Anti-counterfeiting section (“The twenties coming through the airport made Andrew Jackson look like a transvestite vampire or one of the grimmer female martyrs”), Vi is transferred to Protection and assigned to the detail watching the vice president, who is trying hard to pick up the nomination for the next election. This requires a number of stupid excursions to bad places—like the disaster-relief photo-op at a flooded riot zone in backwoods Pennsylvania that gets their section deputy killed—and keeps Vi farther and farther from her family. Meantime, her brother Jens, a computer designer back in New Hampshire, seems to be going off the deep end: He’s created a sort of Dungeon-and-Dragons game called Big If that has developed a gigantic cult following and is poised to make a lot of money on its IPO, but he’s also become so obsessed with the virtual world that he seems to be losing touch with the real one. Vi’s Secret Service colleagues—roguish Vietnam vet Tashmo, high-strung single mother Gretchen, the slutty waif Bobbie—are as cynical and diverting as the platoon of a thousand old WWII movies, but they make good background for the inevitable climax: a loony with a gun.
Nicely shaded characters and believable situations. A thoughtful variation on the usual chicks-with-guns theme.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05116-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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