IF YOU ARE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS

Name: IF YOU ARE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS
Author: Raj Kamal Jha
ISBN: 0-15-101109-5

by Raj Kamal Jha ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2004

The disembodied child’s voice, the wounded crow, the mirror-image lovers, Amir and Rami, the girl in the red dress, the...

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Second-novelist Jha (The Blue Bedspread, 2000) returns with a mysterious, sometimes murky tale set in contemporary India.

Amir lives in a two-room apartment and works in the post office, writing letters for the illiterate. One day, he sees a man offering a ride on the back of a crow for those who are “not afraid of heights.” Also watching are a mother and her daughter, who is yearning for a doll in a red dress. An accident—two colliding trains—leaves Amir bleeding and disoriented on the doorstep of Rami, who lives in Paradise Park, a luxury building in the midst of a slum. Rami takes Amir to her apartment, where he discovers the magical quality of the windows, which can be angled so that they reflect the sky and, on special occasions, the ocean many miles away. On another day, Rami comes home with a crow whose beak has been cut off. She nurses it back to health. When Amir is healed, she suggests he take her home to his humble apartment. Before long, she hears the sound of a child crying and disappears for good. In the second section, Mala, a journalist, investigates the murder of an 11-year-old girl in a red dress, whose body was discovered in a canal, the post-mortem indicating she was gagged and raped. In the third section, a young girl in a red dress reports the events of a week in her neighborhood when people, young and old, killed themselves one by one. A male “friend,” who hides under her bed, shows her how her parents are being watched, making her fear for their safety.

The disembodied child’s voice, the wounded crow, the mirror-image lovers, Amir and Rami, the girl in the red dress, the train accident, the investigating intelligence: all are refracted through various lenses in a novel structured in a kaleidoscopic fashion, offering more poetic satisfaction than clarity.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-15-101109-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.