From Bradbury (for adults, Quicker Than the Eye, 1996, etc.), a fantasy with moments of brilliance swamped by mystical befuddlement. Ahmed, a young boy, gets lost in a sand storm while trekking across the desert with his father’s caravan. He stumbles on a gigantic buried statue, which his tears awaken. The statue is an ancient god, Gonn-Ben-Allah, Keeper of the Ghost of Lost Names. Gonn-Ben-Allah takes Ahmed through space and time, tracing the history of human efforts to fly (an analogy for the ability to imagine and invent). Bradbury is at his best when he describes past flyers who tried and failed; pterosaurs are called “boney kites” and a balloon is described “as ripe as a peach.” There’s also an aviator, a collector of butterflies who sewed up “a thousand small bright wings”—a captivating image—that attempts flight. Ahmed takes in all that Gonn-Ben-Allah shows him, and when the god “dies,” Ahmed follows in the deity’s footsteps, becoming a flyer himself. The exotic setting is exhilarating, although Gonn’s ornate speech comes across as puffed-up posturing, often stalling the plot and sidelining the story’s purpose. Clearly labeled a fable, the tale has instruction built into most passages, but those passages are occasionally breathtaking.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97704-4
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
Parker’s not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment—and he succeeds.
Parker zings—but oh so gently—small-town politics and the pretentious politicians who regulate our lives at the micro-level.
The Committee on Town Happiness is happy indeed to make our happy lives even happier, and to this end its members vote on a constant stream of issues reflecting their concerns. This slim novel contains almost 100 chapters, and in about two-thirds of them a vote is taken on something or other. For example, the committee passes by acclamation a testimonial that “trees demonstrate steadiness of purpose and evenness of demeanor.” When things start to heat up on a controversial topic, the committee votes 5-3 “to destroy the minutes upon adjourning” (though one wag of a committeeman wonders whether "the minutes say destroy the minutes"). The primary goal of the committee is right in its name, but the members run into an obvious dilemma: How does one quantify and measure happiness? They do their best by passing legislation meant to materially increase the well-being of the community as a whole. Such ordinances include the regulation of writing on biking jerseys: “No vulgarities may be printed in sans serif fonts on jerseys; no vulgarities may be written backwards, to be read in rear view mirrors.” When citizens start disappearing, there's concern (and the launching of hot air balloons to find them), and occasionally some slight chicanery interrupts the committee's good intentions, but the plot remains minimal.
Parker’s not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment—and he succeeds.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938103-80-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Not exactly uncharted territory, but Parmar enters it with passion and precision, delivering a sensitive, superior soap...
A devoted, emotionally intense portrait of the Bloomsbury group focuses in particular on sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship is tested to the breaking point by their competing affections for two men.
Plunging into her story—the lives, love affairs, intellectual debates, arguments and achievements of an extensive, creative group of English friends—Parmar (Exit the Actress, 2011) allows the background facts about her real-life characters to emerge as needed. The curious, comfortably middle-class ménage of the four orphaned Stephen siblings—Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa and Virginia—living together in a large house in central London in the early 20th century is the foundation of the book. It’s in this house that Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and many others congregate for bohemian evenings. Bell falls in love with Vanessa; Strachey is a friend of Leonard Woolf, who will eventually return from the Colonies to marry Virginia. Narrated by Vanessa in diary format, punctuated, as if in a scrapbook, by letters, tickets, bills and postcards, this slice of fictional biography spans the years 1905-12, in particular the triangle that forms among Clive, Vanessa and her sister after the birth of the first Bell child. Vanessa, the artist, emerges as “an ocean of majestic calm,” almost infinitely tolerant of her sister, the writer, whose capricious, jealous nature, though tempered by intellectual brilliance and immense charm, tips over at times into madness and suicidal thoughts. This fictional Virginia is far less appealing than her sister, whose nuanced account of her shifting feelings for Clive and eventual love for another invites sympathy. Leonard Woolf’s arrival marks the beginning of the next episode in the group’s extraordinarily intertwined history.
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7637-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
PROFILES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
