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MEAN-SPIRITED TALES

Name: MEAN-SPIRITED TALES
Author: Sandee Harris

by Sandee Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2012

An occasionally intriguing but imperfect collection.

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Harris’ debut collects 17 short “mean-spirited tales” that largely deal with the difficulties of satisfaction—both sexual and artistic.

Advertised with the tagline “Stories for those unafraid to look,” Harris’s stories follow lost characters as they largely fail to find themselves. In “Dilapidated,” heavy-drinking Bridget gets emotionally involved with a man whom she tells us is wrong for her. Per the book’s title, this template recurs several times. But strange little details enliven the telling: To show solidarity with the tooth-missing man, Bridget removes and waves her own temporary tooth. Although not blatantly comical, Harris’s stories are sometimes tinged with a macabre sense of humor, the sort of humor that appreciates vengeful ghosts striking down visitors through the use of a UPS truck, as in “Death Metal \m/.” While that story takes an unusual dip toward the supernatural, it features hallmarks of Harris’s storytelling: a hard-drinking female protagonist who wants to be an artist, even though she has difficulty at work. Many of these stories also share an episodic, seemingly intentional incompleteness—a certain type of conclusion not uncommon in the American literary short story. For example, a New Yorker (a painter manqué) twice runs into a woman who seems “not in synch” with her surroundings, and then the story ends (“Kill Her”); a robbery is planned and partly executed, and the story ends (“The Robbery”); and in the three-page-long screenplay-styled “The Best Daaaamn Yogurt,” a “pseudo French Canadian gremlin” uses her magic dust to avoid paying for her favorite yogurt, with hints about the gremlin’s non-gremlin family life, but not much depth on the page. At times, this jagged incompleteness can be stirring, as it captures something of the serendipity of urban, drunken life. Elsewhere, though, the lacuna seems to be less meaningful.

An occasionally intriguing but imperfect collection.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 123

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.