by Martine Fournier Watson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2019
Themes of coming and going, holding on and letting go, permeate this highly engaging, captivating, and, yes, dream-infused...
A stranger comes to town, offering mysterious potions that will let the townspeople dream about whatever they want, in Fournier Watson's imaginative debut.
When 9-year-old Benjamin Dawson ventures outside to confront an enormous moon above his window, adventure and magic seem to be on offer. Then Benny goes missing, the dream peddler, Robert Owens, arrives, and everyone in town wants to buy his magic potions. Sixteen-year-old Toby Jenkins wants to dream about girls who won't reject him romantically. Benny's father, George, wants a dream that will help him locate his son. Christina Blackwell wants to dream of her future husband. While George and his wife, Evie, struggle to cope with the aftermath of their son's disappearance, the peddler quietly insinuates himself into the life of the town. The seasons change. Eight-year-old Alistair McBryde desires a nightmare that he'll secretly inflict on his bullying brother. Evie ignores her mother's warnings that the peddler is a fraud and approaches him with an unusual dream request. With the peddler present, the town's minister, Mr. Arnold, preaches against the sin of dream-buying. Gossip, lies, deceits, and misunderstandings entangle the peddler in a scandal, and Evie must try to resolve her feelings toward him in a lovely, bittersweet ending. The novel's opening chapters are slightly marred by an occasionally intrusive narrator and some cumbersome backstory. Overall, however, Fournier Watson's tale is gorgeous and carefully paced, with subtle tensions among the townspeople and lush descriptions of the natural world.
Themes of coming and going, holding on and letting go, permeate this highly engaging, captivating, and, yes, dream-infused story.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313317-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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