A sweet but uneven animal tale that aims to touch cat lovers’ hearts.
Sorhage’sdebut children’s picture book showcases the love between a girl and her unusual cat.
When the little girl first sees Mew-Mew, the cat is wearing a full cowgirl outfit and riding a cute brown-and-white horse at a ranch. The girl immediately falls in love and decides to bring Mew-Mew home with her. But this is no ordinary kitty: When she arrives at the girl’shome, she’s wearing a flowing purple skirt, cowgirl boots and a lavender blouse and carrying a purple backpack. The little girl imagines that her kitty speaks with a cowboy accent, using words like “[h]owdy” and “honky-tonk” as she does such things as lasso a lizard and play the electric guitar. The book’s personification of Mew-Mew is charming, but there’s minimal storyline, conflict or character development. Instead, it’s simply a series of moments in which Mew-Mew acts almost like a person. The little girl repeatedly talks about how much she treasures and loves Mew-Mew while watching her play on the computer, chase birds and dance, among other things. There are some delightfully humorous moments, such as when the little girl pinches her nose shut to block the stench of cat food or when Mew-Mew trusses up the lizard during a calf-roping competition. The illustrations are vibrant, with cheerful, bright colors that showcase the happy kitty and her adventures, although they sometimes lack detail and uniqueness. The old-school computer font gives the book a robotic feel, which seems at odds with the warmth and love of the story, and the simplistic presentation—alternating pages of text and illustrations—can sometimes feel repetitive. The text is also awkward to read aloud, as its periodic attempts at rhyme often feel forced. Punctuation and capitalization are also inconsistent, as when the girl makes up nicknames such as “Scouting kitty” and “Yeehaw Kitty.”
A sweet but uneven animal tale that aims to touch cat lovers’ hearts.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482713527
Page Count: 36
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.
Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.
Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits. The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention. Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans. “The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781803366265
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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