“I’m a human gimmick,” confesses Jack, “who wishes he could ditch the special effects.” The author should have ditched them...
First the broken heart, then love, in this reverse-sequence fantasy about a medical freak, French musician/novelist Malzieu’s first U.S. publication.
On the coldest day on earth, Little Jack is born with a heart frozen solid. His teenage mother disappears for good; Jack owes his survival to resourceful midwife Dr. Madeleine, who attaches a cuckoo clock to his heart to get it beating. This happens in Edinburgh on April 16, 1874. Good-hearted Madeleine raises Jack while attending to her clients, mostly prostitutes. His clock-heart, she warns him repeatedly, “is not robust enough to endure the torment of love.” Guess what? The first time they leave the house, ten-year-old Jack is smitten by the sight of a street entertainer, an Andalusian singer as diminutive as himself, and his heart starts whirring dangerously. At school, he learns that Miss Acacia has left town; his informant, a bully named Joe, tells him to back off; Joe has first dibs on the little singer. The boys fight; Joe loses an eye; cops arrive. Jack escapes to Paris, where magician-clockmaker Georges Méliès tells him to forget the clockwork and follow his real heart. It’s good advice; but the clockwork keeps intruding in this novel lamentably short on both heart and characterization. Jack tracks down Miss Acacia in Granada and finds his love reciprocated. Here the story disintegrates as Joe reappears and Jack succumbs irrationally to jealousy and self-hatred, trying to rip out his clock. In noted contrast to L. Frank Baum, who fused fantasy and logic in his simple, dignified portrait of another fellow with a heart problem in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Malzieu undermines both as he flails around. Maybe this strained conceit worked as a concept album for the author’s rock band, Dionysos (La mécanique du cœur, 2007), or director Luc Besson will do better with the projected animated film version.
“I’m a human gimmick,” confesses Jack, “who wishes he could ditch the special effects.” The author should have ditched them too.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27168-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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