A dark, effective exploration of childhood fears.
A debut novel sees a boy fall into a fairy tale within a nightmare.
Ten-year-old Peter Engel is afraid of his dreams. They feel too real. Like the dream he has when he nods off during a math test and finds himself tied to a table, captive of a…witch? (“There, a long spindly figure searched near the hut. She was draped in a long glossy garment of the darkest blue and her arms dangled at her sides like broken branches.”) Peter’s fear makes him an insomniac, always tired, unable to sleep at night or even articulate his distress. Then, on the Friday before Halloween, he meets sixth-grader Sarah. She tells him how to escape from nightmares: All he has to do is fall and hit the ground. But that night, Peter is abducted by flying monkeys who drop him into a forest and into a dream. Running away, he meets the woodcarver Mr. Thorne and his tiny servant, Master Key. Peter takes shelter in their treehouse. He chops wood for Mr. Thorne and, in the forest one day, rescues a young girl from a witch. The girl’s name is Hannah. She seems familiar, but Peter is now forgetting the details of his real life. He is lost, and the witches are closing in. Will he ever find his way home? LaSalle captures the dark atmosphere of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, mixing short, vivid descriptions with a simple narrative style. Peter’s fears and forlornness come across as very real, yet readers are kept at a safe distance by the book’s dreamlike quality. This manifests particularly through the personages of Mr. Thorne and Master Key, who converse at a slight remove from reality and wouldn’t be out of place in a Lewis Carroll tale. Peter is a brave, if rather fatalistic, protagonist, remaining resolute even though out of his depth. The novel doesn’t provide easy answers—there is little guidance and no underlying moral—but this is apt. As with many of the Grimms’ stories, young readers may thrill at the shadows and, where necessary, take comfort merely in not being alone.
A dark, effective exploration of childhood fears.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-04007-2
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Winterset Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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