A delightfully weird tale suitable for both adults and children.
In Spring’s debut comedy novel, a kidnapped man tries to solve a puzzle by listening to his strange captors’ stories.
Lewis Moody is being held prisoner. He knows that he’s somewhere in New Jersey, but he can’t find his way back home to Tennessee due to “mental blocking” from creatures called the Legends of Verbal Cartoonery. The leaders of these six-inch-long, wormlike beings, Orville and Erval, tell him that they’re willing to let Lewis go if he can find the correct clues in their stories they call “verbal cartoons.” Lewis tries to find a connection among the stories, such as “Derringer Tennis,” about a dangerous tennis match, and “Pinnie,” about a talking bowling pin; at the same time, he tries to work out how to escape on his own. He eventually convinces the LOVC to try bass fishing, hoping that they will help him become a professional—and, with any luck, attend a bass-fishing tournament held in Tennessee. Spring opens his novel with a “Warning Label,” in which he tells readers that unraveling the LOVC’s puzzle is “too frustrating” to attempt, but the book isn’t structured like a mystery. Instead, it wisely focuses on Lewis’ search for a way out of his predicament. Lewis tries to find possible allies among the worms, and at one point, he manipulates them by furtively using a modified dog zapper, which pacifies them. (He also references the bass-fishing tourney as often as he can.) The worms’ stories aren’t obviously laden with clues; instead, they often feel more like asides. Some are amusing, such as “Maurice, the Scum-Sucking Pig,” which finds its hilarity in literalness, while others are merely allegories, such as “Identity,” a short parable told by the female worm Kim. The novel, which also includes simple illustrations, finds its charm in a blasé approach that doesn’t call attention to its own peculiarity: Talking telepathic worms “with lips they borrowed from Marilyn Monroe,” it seems to say, are eccentric only if the reader finds them so.
A delightfully weird tale suitable for both adults and children.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492923022
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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