Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take...
A kind of darkly comic Asian version of Midnight Express, as second-novelist Kneale (the Whitbread-winning English Passengers, 2000) describes a young Englishman trapped in Japan.
Daniel Thayne is your typical middle-class dropout. Shortly after leaving university, Dan decides to chuck England altogether, and eventually ends up in Japan. There, he finds work teaching English at the Vital School, a storefront operation patronized mainly by bored housewives and unmarried girls looking for foreign husbands. The wages are lousy, the students difficult, and Daniel is never paid on time. Why does he stay? Well, he’s lost his passport, for one thing. And he’s started going out with one of his students, for another. His girlfriend Keiko is pouty and immature, fond of Mickey Mouse and stuffed animals, but she’s cute and devoted to Daniel in a shy kind of way. Daniel, for his part, is far from being in love with Keiko, but he has few friends in Tokyo and depends upon her company. When she tells him she’s pregnant, he is shocked but agrees to do the right thing and marry her. Still, he begins to express reluctance when Keiko’s father sets up a wedding on a week’s notice. He becomes even more suspicious when Keiko’s family keeps him virtually locked up in their house in anticipation of the happy day. And he begins to panic outright when it becomes obvious that the family business involves shabby hotels in the bad part of town. It’s one thing to break an engagement—and another to walk out on a mobster’s daughter. Especially when you have no passport, your own parents don’t know where you are, and you don’t have a yen to your name.
Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Kneale is out of the gate running.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-297-82899-1
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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