This book is weakened by lack of a driving narrative and details that would bring the main character into clearer focus.
A 15-year-old girl runs away from an abusive home to find refuge and new worlds among the varied populations of Los Angeles.
The first pages of this hybrid novel/story collection by Latiolais (Widow, 2011) tell us immediately where we are: in the realm of poetic, gestural, and not always informative writing. The first paragraph relates that the unnamed narrator was home-schooled and “learning to add had been learning to collect any denomination of coin or bill until she'd had enough to buy this one bus ticket”—which suggests a fairly hardscrabble life and not very good home schooling. But on the next page, in a tallying of the resources she has to survive, the narrator thinks of the “addition and subtraction, fractions and the rudimentary algebra she had loved.” So home schooling had been more rigorous than was first suggested, and her math skills go beyond figuring out the price of a bus ticket. Small discrepancies like these keep us from feeling we really understand the girl's background, though other details are well-chosen, such as her love of sugar and her plump figure. There is something appealing about this courageous young girl who escapes a brutal father, but her path is unrealistically smooth, and we don't get to see her coping with adversity. That she is a naif with old-fashioned diction is believable, since she was raised by conservative Christians, but the number of people she meets who take an interest in her is not. From the first man she gets a ride from to a kindly gallery owner to an even kindlier old man, the girl is taken care of in a way that doesn't seem believable for teen runaways today. Undercutting the persuasiveness of this narrative still further are the stories that punctuate it—a strange choice for a book, making it neither novel nor story collection—because the characters in the stories seem more alive than the shadowy “she.” By the end, Latiolais has sketched a broad tapestry of LA characters, which was presumably the point of the book, but it asks a lot of the reader to stay with the shifts in narrators and even genres in this slim volume.
This book is weakened by lack of a driving narrative and details that would bring the main character into clearer focus.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-28505-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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