The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this...
The 20-year-old Jong-Fast (daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast) makes her literary debut with more style than substance in this slim novel about the travails of a privileged, seriously addicted young woman making the scene in New York’s kiddy society.
Convinced she murdered her boyfriend with an air-bubble in his syringe, Miranda Woke, a tediously decadent 19-year-old who’s been mentioned 16 times on the New York Post’s gossipy “Page Six,” arrives at his funeral with claws bared. She casts a jaundiced eye at the well-heeled mourners on their cell phones, describes their reprehensible and scandalous habits in great detail, and keenly observes their sagging and surgically enhanced flesh clothed in the latest name-brands. Her friend Janice retires to the bathroom to fix heroin; Miranda joins her to snort some cocaine; and so it goes. She has famous, much-married parents who don’t love her, and she in turn doesn’t love anybody, especially not the one person in her life who seems to care at all: ex-boyfriend Brett. Brett is a “Five Towns Jew” who was born to be a podiatrist but instead covers mattresses with frosting and calls himself an artist. Miranda, however, has only one goal: to stay high and in denial (though she does have a typical trust-fund job in an art gallery), and, toward that end, she ingests gallons of vodka, along with a laundry list of illegal substances and prescribed psychotropic drugs that make their way to her from places ranging from tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to the sidewalks of Soho. Will this girl come to her senses in time to save herself? And just how much of Miranda Woke is Jong-Fast? Unfortunately, the second question is more interesting than the first.
The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this first attempt is cartoonish, derivative, and immeasurably too familiar.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50281-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.
Devastated by her mother’s death, Brett Bohlinger consumes a bottle of outrageously expensive Champagne and trips down the stairs at the funeral luncheon. Add embarrassed to devastated. Could things get any worse? Of course they can, and they do—at the reading of the will.
Instead of inheriting the position of CEO at the family’s cosmetics firm—a position she has been groomed for—she’s given a life list she wrote when she was 14 and an ultimatum: Complete the goals, or lose her inheritance. Luckily, her mother, Elizabeth, has crossed off some of the more whimsical goals, including running with the bulls—too risky! Having a child, buying a horse, building a relationship with her (dead) father, however, all remain. Brad, the handsome attorney charged with making sure Brett achieves her goals, doles out a letter from her mother with each success. Warmly comforting, Elizabeth’s letters uncannily—and quite humorously—predict Brett’s side of the conversations. Brett grudgingly begins by performing at a local comedy club, an experience that proves both humiliating and instructive: Perfection is overrated, and taking risks is exhilarating. Becoming an awesome teacher, however, seems impossible given her utter lack of classroom management skills. Teaching homebound children offers surprising rewards, though. Along Brett’s journey, many of the friends (and family) she thought would support her instead betray her. Luckily, Brett’s new life is populated with quirky, sharply drawn characters, including a pregnant high school student living in a homeless shelter, a psychiatrist with plenty of time to chat about troubled children, and one of her mother’s dearest, most secret companions. A 10-step program for the grief-stricken, Brett’s quest brings her back to love, the best inheritance of all.
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-54087-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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