A funny, endearing tale anchored by an impeccably drawn narrator.
Kern tells the story of country music through the eyes of an unlikely producer in this debut novel.
In 1927, 15-year-old Mickey Derow is just looking for an escape when he jumps into an idling Cadillac in New York City. He’s just stolen a salesman’s case of ribbons and is running from the cops, but the men in the Cadillac mistake him for a young recording expert they’re expecting and take him along on their journey to Tennessee. As Mickey puts it, “What I’d got involved in, turned out, was a hunt for singing hillbillies.” In Bristol, Tennessee, the hapless Mickey helps (and hinders) his new employers’ efforts to record amateur musicians for the Victor record company. The talent includes future luminaries like Jimmie Rodgers and Maybelle Carter. The singer who really steals Mickey’s heart, however, is 12-year-old Ida Valentine, whose song isn’t even good enough to get preserved in wax. When the Victor men go back to New York, Mickey volunteers to stay behind and help discover new talent for the emerging record industry—and, of course, find Ida. What follows is a Candide-esque adventure through eight decades of country music as Mickey rises to become a producer of note, pining all the while for love of sweet Ida Valentine. Kern is a writer of enormous talents: in Mickey Derow, she’s created an all-American protagonist in the tradition of Studs Lonigan, Billy Bathgate, and Forrest Gump. His voice is an infectious blend of pluck and naiveté, grit and vulnerability. Through his use of language he seeks to beat the world (and himself) into submission: “I’d seen the waves punching and clawing and climbing over each other, just to be the first to smash their brains out on the sand; and then sliding away beat but never defeated, coming right back for another try….They reminded me of me.” While Mickey’s story is littered with many of the unlikely coincidences that propel this brand of winking historical fiction, Kern imbues the peculiarities of country music with a verve that will make even nonfans appreciate the culture as they read.
A funny, endearing tale anchored by an impeccably drawn narrator.Pub Date: May 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-48-402768-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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