An engaging and unusual story—a debut with promise.
A curious novel blending family drama and supernatural events.
Tragedy strikes when Karen Barrett and her three-year-old daughter, Sherry, are hit by a truck. Karen’s injuries are minor, but Sherry sustains a head trauma that leaves her in a coma. As Sherry languishes in a hospital bed, pronounced brain-dead and about to be taken off life support, the driver that struck her faces his own life-or-death decision. Wracked with guilt, Henry wanders the city, abandoning the idea of his own wife and children, until he finds himself at the edge of a cliff. Something happens—he jumps but is held back by the hand of God or fate or some otherworldly force. He then becomes part of a legion of other ghost-like immortals (led by a man calling himself Tim) who study in the library at night, attempting a kind of penance. Meanwhile, Sherry, able to live without life support, is brought home, where now-single Karen (husband Simon left her shortly after the accident, moving in with another woman) cares for her with the help of retired nurse Ruth. Having attended Sherry for a few months, Ruth discovers that her painful arthritis has gone away. Suspecting Sherry may have healing powers, she invites her terminally ill sister over, and after a single visit, her lung cancer goes into in remission. Soon, news of Sherry’s abilities has spread across the city and beyond, with pilgrims lining up for a chance to touch the holy child. A man calling himself Father Peter (with ancient connections to Tim) threatens the Barretts, accusing them of blasphemy, and not long after, protesters are also in front of their house menacing the fractured family with taunts and random acts of violence. To Wiersema’s credit, he’s able to easily unify the family drama with the startling nature of Sherry’s powers—it is only at the end, when Father Peter and Tim (their true identities revealed) battle it out for cosmic justice, that the author threatens to tip the balance.
An engaging and unusual story—a debut with promise.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36318-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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