A new talent in need of some honing.
Debut collection delineating the tribulations of boyhood, and how they define a man.
Set in Wisconsin, these ten stories feature an upper-Midwestern landscape’s deep snow drifts, acres of farmland and encroaching suburbs, which play a defining role in the characters’ lives. “Puberty” shows an adolescent finding both sexual enlightenment and retributive justice in a strategically planted climbing tree. In “Black Earth, Early Winter Morning,” a 16-year-old boy must reconsider all the advice his older cousin has given him about the value of country living when a tower of improperly stacked hay bales falls on his mentor. Dan Oxford, protagonist of “The Future, the Future, the Future,” has a wife, a good job, a child on the way and a 30-year mortgage locked in at a good rate; now that he’s achieved all the goals he set for himself in college, he decides to mark his accomplishment by skiing an expert slope he can’t handle. The collection features many action scenes, most of them well-written: a boy with his hands in his pockets cannot save himself from a disfiguring fall (“So Long, Anyway”); a drowning student disrupts a swimming class (“Crow Moon”); a widower on an emotional rampage caroms down a ski slope on a stolen sled (“The Cold War”). But sometimes the author pushes action to comic-book extremes, as in “English Cousin,” which shows a bully goading a boy to climb down a chimney and surprise two lovers (he gets stuck), or “Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow,” narrated by a snack-food specialist who attends a convention in San Francisco, where a homeless man teaches him a killing maneuver. The most powerful stories here are more quietly observed. “The Train” is a vignette about a group of boys who visit an abandoned granary at midnight on Halloween. “The Whales” features the same characters walking at night to a park by a lonesome county highway.
A new talent in need of some honing.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-27535-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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