A warm, fun, character-driven tale about moving on and embracing life.
Ricard offers a thoughtful debut novel about a gay man wrestling with the death of his life partner.
Sebastian Hart, a “forty-year-old Broadway chorus boy who wants to be a choreographer,” is haunted by the memory of his deceased spouse, Frank, who died in an accident a year ago, not long after the two argued about a younger man named Greg. The story opens on Sebastian’s birthday in 2008, a night he spent in Manhattan with his best friend, Chloe, a free-spirited former Radio City Music Hall Rockette who’s determined to jump-start his stagnant social life. She sets him up with a handsome man at a bar, but although Sebastian is flattered, his heart (and wedding band) remains right where it was when he was happily married. His life has become a juggling act involving chorus auditions, dreams of choreographing his own production, entertaining friends, consulting his wellness guru, and suppressing vivid memories of his blissful life with Frank. Ricard effectively mixes things up by having Reid, the landscape designer whom Sebastian met on his birthday, pop up again at Sebastian’s tap dancing class. Meanwhile, Greg appears again to torment Sebastian with an arrogant, remorseless vengeance. Will Sebastian ever find true love again? Sparks inevitably fly as this pleasant domestic drama simmers, even amid a somewhat hokey premise that Frank’s ghost is manifesting itself in Sebastian’s cat, Arthur. Along the way, Ricard cleverly incorporates themes of aging, vanity, loss, self-confidence, and forgiveness, grounding the melodrama in the realities of life in the big city. He paints his main character as a loving, sentimental, good-humored man whose heart is in the right place, and many readers will relate to his situation. The narrative is endearing and impressively assured, and it will be an entertaining treat for fans of LGBT romantic fiction.
A warm, fun, character-driven tale about moving on and embracing life.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63489-787-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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