Nothing new, and the recycling is graceless.
A slim, slight, mean-spirited tale of a woman’s obsession with her fiancé’s ex-fiancée, from the author of Dating Big Bird (2000), etc.
This might have made an entertaining or even enlightening subplot in a novel with a larger vision, but the limited scope and shallow characterizations will leave readers feeling unsatisfied, and maybe cheated. Elise and Donald, both New York City transplants to Washington, D.C., meet on the shuttle. Donald has left a Wall Street career for a more satisfying life as a teacher; Elise has left a job editing Sassy magazine to become a freelance editor of self-help books while returning to school to become a teacher. A year later, when the two are living together and planning their wedding, Adrienne, Donald’s supersophisticated, superhumanly gorgeous ex announces that she’s moving to D.C. Elise, who notes that Donald mentioned Adrienne on their first date and has regularly talked about her since, decides that Adrienne wants Donald back. Enlisting her two friends—Fran, the cynical one; and Gayle, the innocent one—in her battle, she proceeds to behave abominably, going through Donald’s dresser drawers, listening to his voice mail, stalking Adrienne. Too ugly to be funny, too thick with failed wisecracks to take seriously, the story fails to deliver on any level. The characters are so thinly drawn—Fran is insulting and smokes cigarettes; Gayle likes to eat; and Donald, the object of contention, is little more than there except for his habit of dropping his pants and getting on all fours when happy or angry, behavior that remains unexplained and unexplored. It, like so much else, is so readily sacrificed to yet another clichéd laugh-line (New York has better food than Washington! Men like large breasts! Jews are pessimistic! Gayle wants to eat again!) that even the mandatory personal-growth denouement (“ . . . what happens will happen whether I am watching or not”) comes only by means of assertion, not drama.
Nothing new, and the recycling is graceless.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41388-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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