Readers may see where it’s going, but this droll narrative’s still a witty, boisterous ride.
Rabin’s debut comedy follows two childhood friends and their misadventures in Brazil with a Jesuit priest, a bomb-loving career criminal, and an unassuming Nazi.
Twenty-three-year-old Hart’s new job takes him from a one-bedroom apartment in Westwood, California, to São Paulo. His first day as senior manager for the Maytag Corporation has yet to begin when his best friend, Simon Jovenda, apparently kidnaps him. Simon, who’d grown up with Hart, had left for Brazil some time ago to find his father’s family and catch some Nazis. So Hart’s justifiably baffled when he winds up on a plane with his assistant, Carmen Dos Reis, Simon, and former German army medic/tennis player Raymond Gil. They land and trek through the jungle to meet a couple of Simon’s friends: a priest and a gruff man covered in tattoos. Meanwhile, criminal boss Julian “Shadow” Coelho, fed up with the greed of local mob PCC, implores his convict buddy Carlos Dos Reis to make something more of his life. Carlos teams up with four mobsters—and Shadow supporters—to cause a bit of property damage in São Paulo using homemade bombs. Carlos’ path will ultimately intersect with Hart’s before the younger man can understand his involuntary journey. But even Simon, who claims he’s trying to save Hart, admits that his original plan may have gone off the rails. The author initially structures his novel like a series of vignettes, bouncing around the timeline with myriad characters, including pregnant Manuela Dos Reis. It’s never confusing, though, and consistently entertaining courtesy of Rabin’s humor-laced prose, foreshadowing Hart’s propensity for carsickness and later delivering a revolting but hilarious moment. There are links to the stories, too, before everything comes together at the end, such as repeated references to the upcoming 2016 Olympics in Brazil. Rabin, in fact, so meticulously develops the characters and their backgrounds that the eventual reveals are hardly surprising; in a few instances, they’re almost inevitable. Nonetheless, the book’s practically buzzing with quirky subplots, like Hart’s boss’ seeming obsession with tracking down his employee and the tale of how Hart inadvertently started working for a pornographic film company.
Readers may see where it’s going, but this droll narrative’s still a witty, boisterous ride.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9970468-1-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Ponderosa Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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