Despite occasionally clunky prose, a tight narrative that adeptly balances raw emotional trauma with compassion and...
In playwright Bishop’s debut novel, teenage Lila’s unexpected, stillborn baby acts as a catalyst in helping a small Australian community heal long-festering emotional wounds.
With the weird grace of a Jane Campion film, this novel balances the potential tear-jerker quality of its story with richly drawn characters. Titular girl Lila handles the birth of her stillborn, premature baby with a surprising aplomb, ducking her teenage brother Jason as he heads out to school and her travel-agent mother Meredith as she rushes off to her unfulfilling job. While Lila fends off a visit by her possessive boyfriend, Dean, with text messages, Meredith internally rehashes the epic failure of her marriage to cad Cliff while flirting with her middle-age co-worker Charles. Meanwhile, Lila’s depressed neighbor Doris is drawn out of her decadeslong funk and into the oddly appropriate role of savior/mentor. Will Meredith allow herself to experience love, as opposed to hanging on to the illusion of glamorized lust? Will the residents of the poverty-stricken Pandora Crescent overcome their failures and begin leading new lives? Although peppered with the occasional cliché— “weak at the knees,” “The wheels of justice,” “her little eyes as round as saucers,” etc.—this novel has a taut, surprising narrative. Bishop has a knack for weaving what could be ponderous back stories into the main thrust of the narrative, thereby rewarding readers instead of punishing them with unnecessary detail. Additionally, while the characters occasionally exhibit somewhat outlandish flourishes, Bishop complements these traits with an unerring sense of human frailty: “Lila could not remember Meredith ever crying again. If she had, it was behind her own closed bedroom door and not in front of her children.” The icky emotional territory of the novel is leavened with compassion and a wry sense of humor, while carefully chosen rural and urban features, from wind storms to the forced intimacy of unimaginative tract housing, subtly move the story forward. Essentially, Bishop plumbs the flawed depths of human regret without relying on manipulative theatrics.
Despite occasionally clunky prose, a tight narrative that adeptly balances raw emotional trauma with compassion and inventive staging.Pub Date: March 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1452513683
Page Count: 230
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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