A thoughtful novel that resists easy moralizing.
When the hunt for a fugitive causes police to institute a lockdown, everyday tensions in a quiet Pennsylvania town threaten to boil over in Knecht’s atmospheric debut.
At 16, Livy Marko is in the midst of the kind of small-town adolescence about which indie movies are made: she’s spending the sweltering summer babysitting, waitressing, and swimming in the creek with her longtime best friend, Nelson. So when the power goes out, it seems, at first, to “fit into a grand pattern of municipal slights”—Lomath, Pennsylvania, is not, in general, a hub of international intrigue. But, as soon becomes clear, the outage is no accident: the local police have blocked off the town on FBI orders. A fugitive from the Republic of Georgia is hiding in the Lomath woods, though the police won’t say more, and no one can come in or out of town until he’s found. As the lockdown drags on with no end in sight, the community becomes increasingly restless, and Livy finds herself inadvertently entangled in a potentially dangerous plot (or two)—and getting a surprise crash course in moral ambiguity along the way. Livy, however, isn’t the only one in Lomath keeping secrets; even her parents are more complicated than they initially appear. Knecht expertly captures the subtle social dynamics of a town suspended in crisis, chronicling mounting anxiety in crisp, unfussy prose. But while Livy and her family are drawn with tremendous precision—Livy’s relationship with her parents, in particular, is delightfully nuanced, and her complicated friendship with Nelson is fantastically un-twee—the novel occasionally feels just a bit overpopulated, with a few too many local personalities who never quite come into focus. Similarly, periodic sections focusing on the fugitive’s story are uniformly intriguing but lack the immediacy and impact of Livy’s narrative.
A thoughtful novel that resists easy moralizing.Pub Date: March 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-22-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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