An Ocean’s 11–type tale of an intriguing oenophile underworld.
A broke, blue blood gamester grooms a wine-savvy “rube” for a high-stakes tasting competition in this crime novel.
Nattily dressed Trilby is “toying with a glass of Crozes-Hermitage” in a New York City wine bar when a leggy beauty saunters in. After she orders a Gamay, a jeans-clad yokel named Bobby arrives and tries to flirt with her. She says that if he can tell her what she’s drinking by tasting it, she’ll provide her phone number. He surprisingly nails it, and she throws a glassful of wine in his face and storms off. Trilby springs into action and sets up a taste test (called a “blind”) for Bobby, who manages to identify a series of wines. The newcomer reveals that he recently arrived from Omaha, where his dad was in the wine business. Trilby then takes Bobby to a blind betting event, which he wins. This spurs Trilby to prepare his protégé for La Paulée, the top blind competition, run by shady Hong Kong-based Johnny Tan and coming soon to San Francisco. He trains Bobby using the wine cellar in his inherited, but now heavily mortgaged, brownstone. Bobby wins several run-up events, including one at Sotheby’s. There, Johnny is dazzled by Katya, a Russian billionaire’s daughter, who places a $200,000 bet on Bobby for the upcoming La Paulée. Worried about covering that gamble, Johnny brings in a one-eyed man, Sommurai, who bested Trilby at a previous competition, and blackmails La Paulée’s presiding judge to rig the event. Trilby waits to place his all-in bet until the eleventh hour, leading to a conclusion that prompts him to “cry and laugh simultaneously.” Debut novelist Amon brings plenty of Pulp Fiction–style punch to this rollicking story of wine-snob grifters. He relates the drugs-and-sex sleaze of Tan and his crew with gusto, as well as the mechanics of setting odds and other details of blinding events. The narrative moves frothily along with plenty of dramatic suspense, giving readers a growing sense of a looming double cross. Some readers may find the revelation of a major scam to be a bit far-fetched, and one character’s pedophilia pushes the envelope of acceptable edginess. Overall, however, Amon has crafted a fast-paced, entertaining caper.
An Ocean’s 11–type tale of an intriguing oenophile underworld.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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