But can there ever be a final matching up between two such disparate creatures? Only the moonlight knows.
Fourth in the Ferrets Chronicles, following Writer Ferrets: Chasing the Muse (p. 1154), which headed the ferrets for the bestseller list. In their Montana childhood and youth, these two rode together, ranchpaw Montgomery Ferret and blue-hatted, silver-furred Cheyenne Jasmine Ferret, when he taught her to ride a delphin and jump fences. “Look at those two,” says Monty’s brother Zander. “Different as rock and water, alike as birds on a branch!” Monty’s is a world outdoors, while she’s a film buff. Eventually, she goes off to Hollywood, breaks into flicks in Heshsty Ferret’s The Lady Speaks. Back at Little Paw, Monty learns the language of delphins, wins races riding Boffin, his delphin. He meets the forthright philosopher ferret Kinnie, who can appear or vanish in a puff and whose earthy wisdom makes Monty spiritually “Strong enough to meet my needs.” He opens a Western riding and racing school while asking questions of his higher self, then makes bestselling books on tape of his wisdom, later selling his famous rainbow fleece and averting tragedy to the flock. Cheyenne, meanwhile, does action scenes in megafilms. Their romance blooms with a bittersweet tang. Then Monty returns to Little Paw while Cheyenne goes for a shoot in Venezuela. Her performances sweep the Boxxes Film Festival and the College of Actors Awards, and the lovers meet at the premiere of Monty’s Rainbow sheep in the Canyon Performance.
But can there ever be a final matching up between two such disparate creatures? Only the moonlight knows.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2755-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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