Wojtas’ debut is every bit as lighthearted, levelheaded, inventive, hilarious, and altogether enchanting as its heroine, who...
A middle-aged Edinburgh librarian is sent back to 19th-century Russia with orders to complete an unspecified mission within a single calendar week of a year she can’t determine. Say what?
It’s no wonder that Shona McMonagle styles herself the crème de la crème. Not only does she do yeoman work at the Morningside Library, but as a restless alumna of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, she’s honed such diverse skills as knife throwing and accordion playing. So Miss Blaine, suddenly appearing at the library, has no hesitation in dispatching her to an unnamed Russian town a hundred-something years ago to perform an important task that she’s sure Shona will recognize on her own. Naturally, Shona, whisked over the miles and decades, decides that her brief is to rescue novice socialite Lidia Ivanovna Chrezvychainodlinnoslovsky from the elderly general whom she seems fated to wed and match her instead with Sasha, the beautiful serf and protégé of a thoroughly irritating countess. Shona matter-of-factly accommodates herself to her new identity as Shona Fergusovna, aka Princess Tamsonova, and her own serf, a coachman named Old Vatrushkin who adamantly resists her efforts to raise his consciousness, but still faces several obstacles. Lidia Ivanovna is shy and retiring; she’s never so much as met Sasha; as Shona makes the rounds of the society hostesses most likely to organize parties that might bring them together, the hostesses develop a disconcerting habit of falling down staircases to their deaths; and Lidia Ivanovna turns out to have been on the scene of several of these fatalities. As if that weren’t bad enough, Shona, despite her finely honed research skills, just can’t figure out what year it is.
Wojtas’ debut is every bit as lighthearted, levelheaded, inventive, hilarious, and altogether enchanting as its heroine, who richly deserves another jaunt through time and space.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63194-170-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
If nothing else, you have to giggle over how this novel’s namesake, who held vicious white supremacist opinions, must be...
Some very nice, very smart African-Americans are plunged into netherworlds of malevolent sorcery in the waning days of Jim Crow—as if Jim Crow alone wasn’t enough of a curse to begin with.
In the northern U.S. of the mid-1950s, as depicted in this merrily macabre pastiche by Ruff (The Mirage, 2012, etc.), Driving While Black is an even more perilous proposition than it is now. Ask Atticus Turner, an African-American Korean War veteran and science-fiction buff, who is compelled to face an all-too-customary gauntlet of racist highway patrolmen and hostile white roadside hamlets en route from his South Side Chicago home to a remote Massachusetts village in search of his curmudgeonly father, Montrose, who was lured away by a young white “sharp dresser” driving a silver Cadillac with tinted windows. At least Atticus isn’t alone; his uncle George, who puts out annual editions of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, is splitting driving duties in his Packard station wagon “with inlaid birch trim and side paneling.” Also along for the ride is Atticus’ childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, another sci-fi fan, whose family lived in the same neighborhood as the Turners. It turns out this road trip is merely the beginning of a series of bizarre chimerical adventures ensnaring both the Turner and Dandridge clans in ancient rituals, arcane magical texts, alternate universes, and transmogrifying potions, all of which bears some resemblance to the supernatural visions of H.P. Lovecraft and other gothic dream makers of the past. Ruff’s ripping yarns often pile on contrivances and overextend the narratives in the grand manner of pulp storytelling, but the reinvented mythos here seems to have aroused in him a newfound empathy and engagement with his characters.
If nothing else, you have to giggle over how this novel’s namesake, who held vicious white supremacist opinions, must be doing triple axels in his grave at the way his imagination has been so impudently shaken and stirred.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-229206-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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