The Symmetry of Snowflakes

Name: The Symmetry of Snowflakes
Author: Paul Michael Peters
ISBN: 978-1505693690

by Paul Michael Peters ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny...

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In Peters’ (Peter in Flight, 2013) novel, a young man on the brink of making it big must sort out his complicated family and personal situations.

Hank Hanson has problems that many other people would like to have. At 29, he owns his own boutique greeting-card firm, which has received a multimillion-dollar buyout offer. He has a large extended family, due to his parents’ divorces and remarriages, and they all want to see him for the holidays—or as he terms it, his “annual trial—several long weeks that will test my character and prove my endurance.” Although he’s insecure, he’s still attractive enough for a beautiful woman, Erin Contee, to give him her number. However, it turns out that she has a past that affects other people in his circle. Then, his unreliable father has a financial crisis and a health scare that forces Hank to re-examine his own choices. The author paces his story well and offers some pithy images: when family friends observe the protagonist’s resemblance to his departed mother, he notes “an awkward stir of the emotional sediment that has gone untouched since our last meeting.” Hank, though, is a problematic character. On the one hand, he’s a nice-guy hero who takes care of the people around him; for example, when his siblings won’t help their father, Hank is willing to bail him out, which costs him much time, money, and effort. On the other hand, readers may find his self-pity hard to take, given his mostly enviable position in life. Many people are caught in Hank’s “sandwich generation” and supporting their parents—but with nothing like $17 million to allay expenses. Also, Hank’s tendency to blame women for his own actions reads as if he’s making excuses: “if Midge is this capable of manipulating people to get what she wants, how talented must other women be?” Women manipulate and men make mistakes, in Hank’s view—and it’s a view that calls his good-guy status into question.

A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny hero.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1505693690

Page Count: 257

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RIGHT HAND OF THE RESISTANCE
by Paul Michael Peters

- BOOK REVIEW
COMBUSTIBLE PUNCH
by Paul Michael Peters

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CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

by Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1983

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In this new novella by the Nobel Prize-winner, a Colombian-village murder 20 years in the past is raked over, brooded upon, made into a parable: how an Arab living in the town was assassinated by the loutish twin Vicario brothers when their sister, a new bride, was rejected by her bridegroom—who discovered the girl's unchastity. Cast off, beaten, grilled, the girl eventually revealed the name of her corrupter—Santiago Nassar. And, though no one really believed her (Nassar was the least likely villain), the Arab was indeed killed: the drunken brothers broadcasted their intentions casually; they went so far as to sharpen their murder weapons—old pig-sticking knives—in the town market; and the town, universal witness to the intention, reacted with epic ambivalence—sure, at first, that such an injustice couldn't occur, yet also resigned to its inevitability. As in In Evil Hour (1979) and other works, then, what Garcia Marquez offers here is an orchestration of grim social realities—an awareness that seems vague at first, then coheres into a solid, pessimistic vision. But, while In Evil Hour threaded the message with wit, fanciful imagination, and storytelling flair (the traits which have made Garcia Marquez popular as well as honored), this new book seems crammed, airless, thinly diagrammatic. The theme of historical imperative comes across in a didactic, mechanistic fashion: "He never thought it legitimate," G-M says of one character, ironically, "that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so there should be the untramelled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold." (Also, the novella's structural lines are uncomfortably close to those of Robert Pinget's Libera Me Domine.) So, while the recent Nobel publicity will no doubt generate added interest, this is minor, lesser Garcia Marquez: characteristic themes illustrated without the often-characteristic charm and dazzle.

Pub Date: April 15, 1983

ISBN: 140003471X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
UNTIL AUGUST
by Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY
by Gabriel García Márquez edited by Cristóbal Pera translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
I'M NOT HERE TO GIVE A SPEECH
by Gabriel García Márquez translated by Edith Grossman

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WASHINGTON BLACK

by Esi Edugyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2018

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.

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High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.

It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.