MARGARITO AND THE SNOWMAN

Name: MARGARITO AND THE SNOWMAN
Author: REYoung
ISBN: 978162891446

by REYoung ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2016

There are spasms of brilliance, but too much of this book reads like a private joke—good if you’re in on it, less good if...

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Postmodern novelist REYoung (Unbabbling, 1997) returns with a madcap, shaggy dog tale set along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Throw Under the Volcano into a blender with Cat’s Cradle, Finnegans Wake, Pedro Páramo, and the collected works of Charles Bowden, and you have something approaching REYoung’s latest. His borderland is a Trump-ian dream, cleaved by a wall 20 feet tall: “Black, impassive, impassable, it stretched into infinity in the east and in the west.” Yet the desert is an odd thing here, with waist-high snowdrifts in the place of sand dunes, crisscrossed as ever by the Border Patrol, smugglers, and other intruders in the silence of the wasteland. One of the more loquacious of them is Margarito, tutor to an odd character named the Snowman, who is in this hot yet snowy country for reasons that seem to have something to do with a movie directed by a Sam Peckinpah reincarnation named Boone Weller. Is Snowman really a method actor named Billy, a scandal back in Hollywood hot on his heels, or is he someone else, or is the whole shebang a grand and glorious hallucination? Judging by some of the characters’ diets—one, Young writes, possessed of bloodshot eyes “infused with hydrocarbons, THC, methamphetamine, nicotine, malt liquor, Ice”—the possibilities for the last are quite real. And as for the capitalized Ice, well, there’s a reason the desert is white and that the character is named Snowman. Young exults in language, sometimes to the point of indiscipline; the storyline, opaque to begin with, is often buried in sheer verbiage. Often he hits on some nicely philosophical aperçus and mots justes—“Does God feel sorrow and remorse for all the little tortures he she it has devised for us…?” “everyone was rolling up joints, spliffs, fucking industrial-sized marijuana smokestacks, everybody laughing and talking manic stoned bullshit”—but just as often the yarn staggers under the weight of its own cleverness.

There are spasms of brilliance, but too much of this book reads like a private joke—good if you’re in on it, less good if not.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016

ISBN: 978162891446

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.