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MILES FROM NOWHERE

Name: MILES FROM NOWHERE
Author: Nami Mun
ISBN: 978-1-59448-854-2

by Nami Mun ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2009

Austere, but with its own bleak beauty.

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Harrowing tale of homelessness, addiction and prostitution, with a small hint of hope at the end.

Mun’s debut novel consists of a series of concatenated stories featuring a recurring cast of characters. At the center stands narrator Joon, in the first chapter a 13-year-old runaway looking to make it on the streets of New York. She soon finds out that survival is tougher than she expected. We follow her movement from a homeless shelter to the Club Orchid, where she works as a hostess, through an abortive stint as an Avon lady and a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to jail, for stealing, and finally to an employment agency. Along the way Joon encounters most of the lamentable horrors of modern urban life. Her streetwise mentor is the improbably named Knowledge, three years Joon’s senior, who teaches her the rudimentary tricks of survival. At Club Orchid Joon has a distasteful sexual experience and later, at 16, a self-induced abortion. She meets a series of men who, to put it mildly, are not looking out for her best interests. Of course, neither is Joon, who shoots up, snorts, inhales, injects or drinks any powder, crystal, pipe bowl, beer or liquor she can get her hands on. She reports her life as though it’s someone else’s, always maintaining a critical detachment and eschewing a self-pitying gaze. Despite sincere avowals that she wants to get straight, the cards are stacked relentlessly against her. Only toward the end does she get clean and sober at age 18. A kindly employment agent overlooks her undistinguished résumé (multiple misdemeanors—and typing at 17 wpm) to find her a modest job delivering sandwiches to office workers. Perhaps now Joon can start over and get off the streets.

Austere, but with its own bleak beauty.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-59448-854-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.