A quirky, imaginative, dazzling black comedy.
Vada Prickett is dying, pinned under a stupendous stuffed bear, thinking about his short life and a fond-of-puns God enjoying the "Moon over My Hammy" breakfast at the local Denny's.
With word play sparkling and crackling across the pages, Griffith cuts and polishes his story with esoteric Bob Dylan–like references and Stephen Wright's sometimes piquant and sardonic observations. Vada, not quite 30 and "waiting … for his life to start," was helping his neighbor and best friend, Wyatt Yancey, slip one final trophy into his house before Yancey's marriage to his taxidermy-hating fiancée, Darla. Vada too loves Darla, which adds to the fun. In the minutes between bear-crush and death, Vada recalls his youth, son of a wildlife agent father and a homemaker with the moxie to use a ballpoint pen in an emergency tracheotomy. Vic Prickett's friendship with the rich and fun-loving Reid Yancey led to the Pricketts enjoying a ritzy lake-side development home near Columbia, S.C. A decent student, Vada reached his first year of college in pursuit of his dream, becoming a large-animal vet. And then his parents were killed by an errant poultry truck while hauling the household trash to the dump. Always a half-beat off in the social dance and all matters practical, Vada, sans parents, has floundered aimlessly as a "Hose Attendant" at the Caw-Caw Car Wash, domain of an admirer of Mussolini, Il Duce. Told in the third-person, the author also often addresses the reader directly: "reader, we are donkeys who pin on our own tails." The novel is a surrealistic meditation on, and a send-up of, the American dream, consumerism, God, the modern family and assorted other human foibles, complete with a semi-pro evangelical Christian baseball team, the Risen, with a mascot named "Pablo the Bible-believing Possum." Griffith's word wizardy, his facile puns, his insight into the human heart and his topsy-turvy sardonic approach make for a one-of-a-kind reading experience.
A quirky, imaginative, dazzling black comedy.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5218-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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