Fast-paced, outrageous, and on the money: first-novelist Nelson’s mockery of media mendacity is as biting as La Dolce Vita...
Deft, jolly send-up of publishing by actor and former TV writer/host Nelson (Mike Nelson’s Mind Over Matters, 2002), this about a hack who learns, after 40 years of failure, the meaning of concept.
Pontius (“Ponty”) Feeb has published 18 books, though you won’t find them in Barnes and Noble. That’s because Ponty wrote exclusively for Jack Pine Publications, a Minneapolis house that specialized in titles like Old Von Steuben Had a Farm: The German-American Settlement of the Midwest and The Journal of Plasma Beam Annealing. But obscurity is fine for Ponty, who lives alone and takes real pride in his work—although when Jack Pine is sold to a media conglomerate in Denver, Ponty is dropped faster than a midlist novel. Suddenly destitute, he takes a job flipping patties at Medieval Burger while trying to market a horror manuscript about a giant rat loosed on a Minnesota town in the 19th century. No one is interested in publishing a thriller by an overweight 60-year-old, so Ponty asks hunky young Jack Rybeck (an aspiring actor who works at Medieval Burger) to be his “front.” Jack agrees and manages to snag a contract, but he mistakenly tells the publishers that Death Rat is a true story. Not a problem if the book had flopped, but with Jack gobbling up national publicity (“the perfect author for the nouveau-pop age,” says a reviewer), Death Rat soars to the top and brings the media out in force. To escape exposure, Ponty and Jack convince the townsfolk of Holey, Minnesota, to go along with Ponty’s fiction and make up ancestral tales of rat terror for the reporters. Meanwhile, egomaniacal author Gus Bromstad has gotten wind of rumors that Death Rat is going to beat him out for the Dwee Award, and he’s hired a shadowy group of Danish hit men to rub out Jack.
Fast-paced, outrageous, and on the money: first-novelist Nelson’s mockery of media mendacity is as biting as La Dolce Vita or Network—and funnier.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-093472-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
