by Richard Grayson ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A funny, odd, somehow familiar and fully convincing fictional world.
The dynamic Brooklyn cityscape serves as the backdrop in this beguiling collection of short stories.
Grayson’s tenth volume of fiction introduces a multicultural multitude of characters, including a teen lesbian from Uzbekistan who works as a Brooklyn Cyclones hot-dog mascot and a gay black student whose Pakistani roommate’s pet monkey helps him find acceptance on a mildly homophobic campus. Most, though, are slight variations on the quasi-autobiographical persona of a middle-aged white man reminiscing about the friends, families, lovers and locales that have populated his life. Grayson often constructs his loose, episodic narratives with a pop-culture scaffolding, as in “Seven Sitcoms,” in which the narrator meditates on his relationship with his family’s black housekeeper through a commentary on the racial and class stereotypes of early TV sitcoms; and “1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow,” a reconstruction of a love affair between a man and his much younger stepbrother, paired with a hilarious exegesis of a comic-book hero in decline. In other stories, like “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn” and “The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach,” the author maps out memories against the geography of his beloved Brooklyn, with excursions to Los Angeles and South Florida. Grayson’s low-key, conversational prose is injected with flashes of wry wit (“I live in a neighborhood where neighbors notice my lack of body art”), but some of the slighter pieces are no more than droll shaggy-dog stories. The more substantial ones, however, like “Conselyea Street,” about a gay man with a younger Japanese lover reflecting on his Williamsburg neighborhood’s demographic transitions–from Italian to Hispanic to hipster to yuppie–fuse vivid characters with a keen sense of place and cultural specificity.
A funny, odd, somehow familiar and fully convincing fictional world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 1-4116-7595-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
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
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