Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.
Feisty teenager copes with first love, glasses, disasters, and wayward adults in this fourth novel from Kincaid. (Verbena, 2002, etc.).
Berry Jackson is trudging through adolescence in the overheated hamlet of Pinetta, Florida. The absence of shopping malls and superhighways, and the presence of cat’s-eye frames, Rexall lunch counters, quicksand, and chain gangs suggest the 1950s or early ’60s. Fluent in the local patois, undeterred by myopia and misgivings about her appearance, Berry is a garrulous observer of the teeming life around her. She shares a bedroom with her two brothers, younger Wade and older, oversexed Sowell, inheritor of the family good looks. Mom Ruthie feeds hobos, slings coffee, and moons over the Methodist minister, Butch Lyons. Ford Jackson is a revered school principal but a cipher of a father. On the social ladder, the Jacksons fall midway between the Longmonts, who own the gas station/grocery, and the Millers, who inhabit a kudzu-choked shack and overbreed. Episodic vignettes establish an atmosphere in which serpents, poisonous and nonpoisonous, aren’t just archetypes but everyday nuisances. Butch Lyons skips town, and the Methodists are called to hear Jewel Longmont confess to a dalliance with him. The story, after a languorous start, accelerates when a tornado hits. The big storm follows “goodbye-night,” a prom where the Millers’ abused and gorgeous elder daughter, Rennie, makes her glamorous debut in a borrowed dress. Ford Jackson drives her home through a flood—and both disappear. Much of Pinetta is leveled by the twister, and the state sends in convicts to help reconstruct, including Raymond, who rescues Berry both from snakebite and wallflower-dom. Ruthie finds a safe harbor with Jack Longmont after Jewel flees with her daughter, Marie. In a diva-ex-machina ending, Rennie returns to expose some lies and perpetuate others, before the swamp extrudes the truth about the missing pillars of Pinetta.
Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-00914-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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