Overstuffed, but serious readers will appreciate Ozeki’s passionate engagement with important ideas.
A boy who hears objects talking and his mother, who can’t stop hoarding things, work out their destinies in a meditative tribute to books, libraries, and Zen wisdom.
Everything starts going awry for Benny Oh the year he turns 12, “the same year his father died and his mother started putting on weight.” It’s not just pounds that Annabelle adds; she obsessively accumulates things—kitchenware, snow globes, it doesn’t really matter what—to fill the void left by her husband’s death. Meanwhile, the voices Benny hears in everything from coffee cups to windowpanes become so insistent that he unwisely reveals his unwelcome ability at school and winds up in a pediatric psychiatry ward. There he meets a girl called The Aleph, whose enigmatic notes lead him post-hospital to the local library and a quest for meaning directed by The Aleph and a homeless hobo who was “a super famous poet back in Slovenia.” As she did in A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Ozeki counterpoints faultless contemporary teenspeak with an adult third-person voice—in this case, intriguingly, the voice of Benny’s Book. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine,” Benny tells the Book, and their interaction drives the story. The Book connects Annabelle’s hoarding to the looming ecological catastrophe slowly being triggered by human beings’ carelessness and waste; the voices Benny hears, it suggests, are calls to recognize our kinship with the other beings on our planet. Annabelle is getting a similar message from a book that jumps into her shopping cart: Tidy Magic, “written by a real Zen monk.” Ozeki’s insertion of Zen teachings into the narrative is slightly contrived, but she underscores the urgency of her spiritual message by ratcheting up the physical-world tension for her characters, as Annabelle’s stockpiling puts her at risk of being evicted from her home and having Benny placed in foster care. Benny’s final assertion of agency provides a moving, albeit hasty, wrap-up for a novel that staggers somewhat under the weight of everything the author wants to say.
Overstuffed, but serious readers will appreciate Ozeki’s passionate engagement with important ideas.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-39-956364-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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