by Miles Keaton Andrew ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2002
Fast, funny, and remarkably good-natured: You’ll die laughing.
An extremely funny debut novel, set mostly within the confines of a funeral home that hugs the shoreline of bad taste without actually running aground.
Had he been born about 20 years later, Casey Kight would have been a Goth—as it was, in 1974, he was just plain weird. Orphaned at ten, when his parents died in a plane crash, Casey wore a black suit to school (which may have been why he never found a girlfriend) and for good luck carried the key to a funeral parlor with him everywhere he went. On his 21st birthday, he was hired by the Morton-Albright Funeral Home in Angel Shores, Florida, and began work as a mortuary apprentice. His boss, Jerry Stiles, was blunt in his assessment: “There are only three types of men working in the funeral trade: those born into it, those married into it, and those drawn into it. It’s the latter type that gives me pause.” Casey was drawn all right, but he’s not morbid—he’s a natural. Soon he is living at the home as well as working there (much of their business comes in after-hours, you see), and Jerry is fixing him up with his daughter Natalie (who likes to bite people and keeps a photo album of, well, corpses). Apparently old Colton Albright, who owns the business, put a clause in his will leaving everything to the youngest member of the family with a male heir, so Jerry sees an opportunity for his daughter and Casey to get busy. Fast. Because Colton’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, as they say in the trade. But there are other problems, too, not the least of which is the Jacob Funeral Trust, a conglomerate that is buying up every independent funeral home in the South and has Morton-Albright in its crosshairs. Is there any chance of a normal life for Casey? Or will his weirdest dreams come true?
Fast, funny, and remarkably good-natured: You’ll die laughing.Pub Date: March 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27462-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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