This novel might have something to say about gender roles, the relationship between literature and life or other standard...
A subversive and often funny exercise in style, voice in particular, with a narrator who pushes unreliability to an extreme.
Hollywood might call this novel “high concept,” with a premise that is as simple as it is outlandish. A 25-year-old woman with no apparent ambition or direction (but with attitude to burn) finds the inspiration that her life has been lacking in an adventure novel typically read (if read at all) by much younger boys. Why Treasure Island?Why not? For the unnamed narrator of this debut novel, the book forces her to confront the essential challenge of her existence: “How can I become a hero of my own life?” It also provides her with what she perceives to be its core values: “BOLDNESS. RESOLUTION. INDEPENDENCE. HORN-BLOWING.” Her attempts to incorporate each of these values into her daily living (the horn-blowing is a bit of a stretch) quickly cost her the latest in her series of dead-end jobs, a boyfriend who is more responsible than she but no more ambitious, a best friend whose loyalty seems suspect, a therapist she can no longer afford to pay and whatever trust remains with her very different sister. But at least she gains a parrot in the process, though the bird proves to be more trouble than the narrator feels that it is worth. Though this is a short novel, and a pretty slight one, the complications compound and narrative momentum accelerates once the unemployed protagonist moves back home, with her parrot, her novel and her conviction that Treasure Islandremains the key to whatever purpose her life has. Soon enough, she has made the lives of every member of her family as dysfunctional as her own.
This novel might have something to say about gender roles, the relationship between literature and life or other standard themes, but mainly it’s just a hoot.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-609-45061-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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