A decades-old, honest love story that never feels like merely a time capsule.
A Jersey Shore romance kindled in the swinging 1970s still smolders when old lovers come together in 2008.
Ronny Hopkins has long pined after his neighbor Katie Kline, the two young Belmar, New Jersey, natives often sharing time together over a little weed and “The White Album.” But Katie is a thoughtful girl, still affected by Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in ’68, moved to explore the issues of the tumultuous era she is growing up in, and charmed by the adult allure of New York but also Ronny’s father. Although their adulterous affair is quickly recognized as a mistake, their liaison leaves behind a handful of nude Polaroids of Katie, which Ronny finds hidden away with his father’s dirty magazines. Yet when Ronny confronts her, the two make love. But a relationship seems untenable, as Katie stays busy paying her dues writing obits for the Village Voice, graduating to chasing stories for the newspaper, while Ronny relaxes on the Jersey Shore, working as a lifeguard and spending his nights at local bars. Worse, Katie struggles with panic attacks, and Ronny’s resentment over her past and present experiences sometimes culminates in violent or jealous outbursts. Distance, family deaths, and other love interests soon pull them apart, but when they reunite for a day in 2008, the remnants of their time together—not naked photographs but his unanswered love letters—promise to remind them of what they once were. Bennett (Summer Mirrors, 2015, etc.) returns to Belmar to tell a warts-and-all love story spanning decades, deftly breaking down the small moments that form long, awkward relationships. The first half of the novel is presented in fast-paced snippets of character and conversation. The dialogue is quick and relies heavily on the two protagonists’ understanding of each other, with their interactions full of in-jokes, slang, and references to their time together. There are recognizable hallmarks to differentiate the ’70s from the modern day, with numerous nods to the music, drug culture, and celebrities, and in the 2000s, that period’s technology. The book’s second half, taking place over a shorter amount of time, slows the pace considerably but keeps the engrossing tale’s most important aspect alive, its delicate switching between Ronny’s and Katie’s points of view.
A decades-old, honest love story that never feels like merely a time capsule.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947021-22-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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