A beguiling collection of well-wrought tales by a writer with talent to burn.
People trapped in a bleak reality cross the line into madness, murder, magic and even hope in these knotty, engrossing stories.
Verola’s bedraggled characters, many of them inhabitants of his gray, cold hometown of Pittsburgh, are losers with dead-end careers, fizzled marriages and a lifetime of regrets who get jolted from their rut by chance, fate or a misguided longing for second chances. The catharsis is constructive for the hero of “LiveDoll,” a friendless librarian who goes to a sex-doll convention and gets roped into a crime plot that reawakens his humanity, as well as for the schizophrenic heroine of the title story, who resolves to silence her inner voice of a plummy English toff who is forever pestering her to kill herself. Things get a bit hairier for the fading Hollywood comic in “Baby Mama,” who takes desperate measures to thwart a gold-digger who’s dunning him for child support, and downright harrowing for the workaholic coroner in “Hello/Goodbye” when she confronts the vengeful ghost of a psychic. Sometimes characters find the universe conspiring against them, a predicament faced in “Three Sides of Life and Death” by a hungry snake who has a frog snatched from his jaws by an unlikely deity; but for the hero of “The Guru Goes to Work,” an aspiring visionary forced to take a job as a shoe-repair technician, the cosmos is a font of unlooked-for grace. These yarns draw you in with vivid, quirky characters, Twilight Zone scenarios, noirish atmosphere and O’Henry twists. Verola’s prose style, pitched halfway between the mundane and the sublime—“I began to feel a peace sitting in the driver’s seat, deeper than any peace I’ve ever had, even more relaxed than in my burgundy leather recliner at home, in which I often fall asleep”—nicely complements his keen narrative chops. The result is bravura storytelling in which a genuine sympathy for the human predicament gleams through the black humor.
A beguiling collection of well-wrought tales by a writer with talent to burn.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1936107537
Page Count: 254
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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