A charming novel charts a child’s intellectual and emotional journey as she copes with a new set of classmates.
Freund (Global Home Cooking, 2014, etc.) relates the adventures of a grade school girl in the Midwest in this energetic YA novel.
Sandy Drue encounters some trouble at her new school. Her family recently relocated from New York City, and her mother’s free-spirited advice fails to help Sandy deal with her inquisitive peers. Sandy recounts being cornered on the playground by her fellow students, who ask which religion she belongs to; Sandy doesn’t know. “You get to believe whatever you decide to believe,” her mother tells her later, even if the girl would prefer a simpler answer. She begins to think of herself as a weirdo (her mother tells her, “The word to use is ‘avant-garde’ ”), though her boundless curiosity for the way the world works keeps her open to the customs of her new school and the changes that come with growing up. After all, there are games to be played, words to be learned, crafts to be made, and a whole series of firsts—good and bad—along the way. In short chapters assembled in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, the novel leaps around Sandy’s childhood from ages 8 to 13, detailing the incremental moments of her development. Freund writes with infectious vitality, perfectly channeling the voice of Sandy in all her precocious naiveté. The reading experience is analogous to that of being a 7-year-old and having the world explained by a 10-year-old. Here, Sandy describes what life was like in the “Olden Days”: “I think everyone had an English accent, even if it was kind of fake, but I don’t know that for sure because they didn’t have tape recorders then.” The novel’s episodic structure shrewdly replicates the rhythms of childhood: issues arise, have meaning, and are forgotten. New days bring new exploits and stir random memories. Freund occasionally drifts into moments of writerly awareness (Sandy at one point sings the praises of Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.), but for the most part, her creation remains immersive, enjoyable, and at times quite moving.
A charming novel charts a child’s intellectual and emotional journey as she copes with a new set of classmates.Pub Date: May 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9887084-8-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Gobreau Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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