Readable and slight.
A boy in rural southern Italy learns about crime firsthand when he discovers that his own father is part of a kidnapping gang. Rich in setting and detail, Ammaniti’s third, his first to be published here, rests contentedly on its YA bedrock.
Michele Amitrano is nine when one hot summer day in 1978 he falls—literally—onto a boy his own age being held prisoner, chained in the bottom of a deep pit out in the country. Michele is with a group of four or five kids from his village—including his five-year-old sister Maria—when he plummets out of a tree right onto the hidden pit, which is covered by a mattress and sheet of corrugated Fiberglas, but he decides at once not to tell any of them (“He was mine. He was my secret discovery”). How, though, could Michele have known that changes at home—his truck-driver father having recently come back to stay instead of making more long hauls, for example—were connected with the bound and bloodied boy in the pit (Filippo Carducci by name, as Michele will learn from the TV news)? The arrival—as a houseguest, the children are told—of an old man named Sergio Materia, and then the gatherings of still other men, who argue angrily among themselves around the dining table into the wee hours—all are ominous signs. After Michele is discovered out at the pit trying to comfort Filippo, not only is he beaten up by gang-helper Felice (“Felice Natale was Skull’s big brother. If Skull was bad, Felice was a thousand times worse”), he’s made to swear never to go back to the pit again, since if he does, his father says, Filippo will certainly be shot. But Michele promised Filippo he’d return. Which will prove stronger: oath to father or promise to the boy? Either way, something terrible is going to happen.
Readable and slight.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-84195-297-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
A steamy, glitzy, and tender tale of college intrigue.
In this opener to Kennedy’s (Hot & Bothered, 2017, etc.) Briar U romance series, two likable students keep getting their signals crossed.
Twenty-one-year-old Summer Heyward-Di Laurentis is expelled from Brown University in the middle of her junior year because she was responsible for a fire at the Kappa Beta Nu sorority house. Fortunately, her father has connections, so she’s now enrolled in Briar University, a prestigious institution about an hour outside Boston. But as she’s about to move into Briar’s Kappa Beta Nu house, she’s asked to leave by the sisters, who don’t want her besmirching their reputation. Her older brother Dean, who’s a former Briar hockey star, comes to her rescue; his buddies, who are still on the hockey team, need a fourth roommate for their townhouse. Three good-looking hockey jocks and a very rich, gorgeous fashion major under the same roof—what could go wrong? Summer becomes quickly infatuated with one of her housemates: Dean’s best friend Colin “Fitzy” Fitzgerald. There’s a definite spark between them, and they exchange smoldering looks, but the tattooed Fitzy, who’s also a video game reviewer and designer, is an introvert who prefers no “drama” in his life. Summer, however, is a charming extrovert, although she has an inferiority complex about her flagging scholastic acumen. As the story goes on, the pair seem to misinterpret each other’s every move. Meanwhile, another roommate and potential suitor, Hunter Davenport, is waiting in the wings. Kennedy’s novel is full of sex, alcohol, and college-level profanity, but it never becomes formulaic. The author adroitly employs snappy dialogue, steady pacing, and humor, as in a scene at a runway fashion show featuring Briar jocks parading in Summer-designed swimwear. The book also manages to touch on some serious subjects, including learning disabilities and abusive behavior by faculty members. Summer and Fitzy’s repeated stumbles propel the plot through engaging twists and turns; the characters trade off narrating the story, which gives each of them a chance to reveal some substance.
A steamy, glitzy, and tender tale of college intrigue.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72482-199-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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