Tremblay excels at atmospheric unease even if the story he’s spinning isn’t always as rich as its milieu.
A teenage boy’s mysterious disappearance from a local park leads his family and friends to contemplate supernatural influences.
Elizabeth Sanderson thinks nothing of letting her 13-year-old son, Tommy, sleep over at his friend Josh’s house, a common summer occurrence in the sleepy Boston suburb of Ames. But when Josh calls in the middle of the night, wondering if Tommy is back home, everything changes. Turns out Tommy, Josh, and their friend Luis snuck out, beers stuffed in backpacks, and headed for Borderland, the sprawling state park nearby, where Tommy ran off. Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts, 2015) makes it clear from the start that the half-truths Josh and Luis are peddling to their parents and the cops are barely that, but he’s not entirely successful at maintaining tension over Tommy’s ultimate fate. Elizabeth tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to hold it together for her younger child, 11-year-old Kate, who becomes a virtual recluse in the wake of her brother’s disappearance. Though Elizabeth appears levelheaded, after she sees what she comes to believe is the ghost of her son crouching in her bedroom late one night, she becomes convinced that Tommy is dead. As the lives of the three boys prior to the fateful night take shape through flashbacks and somewhat clumsily inserted entries from Tommy's diary, which Elizabeth finds, the potential paranormal aspects—particularly the local mythology surrounding the boys’ hangout spot of Devil’s Rock—become almost as believable as the police investigation that’s grounded in reality.
Tremblay excels at atmospheric unease even if the story he’s spinning isn’t always as rich as its milieu.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-236326-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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