by Sarah Rose Etter ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019
A relentlessly original look at what it means to exist in a female body.
A girl born with an unusual disfigurement navigates the loneliness and trauma caused by her physical difference in this surreal first novel.
Cassie comes from a long line of women born with a knotted torso. These knots aren’t small bulges, like a knotted muscle. “Picture,” Cassie tells us, “three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.” At school, Cassie is tormented by her classmates; her only friend, Sophia, runs hot and cold with her affections, and Cassie’s crush, Jarred, finds her both attractive and repulsive. At home, things are not much better. Each day Cassie’s dad and brother go off to the nearby Meat Quarry, tearing raw meat from vast cavern walls and selling it at the market when demand is strong. Cassie’s mother is reaching the age when her knot begins to cause her severe physical pain; she turns her ferocious attention on Cassie’s appearance, encouraging her daughter to slim down by packing her rocks for lunch. When an act of violence shatters whatever uneasy peace Cassie has made with her own body, she must spend the rest of her life dealing with the dark aftermath. Etter, who has one previous collection of short fiction (Tongue Party, 2011), structures this book in fragments, alternating the story of Cassie’s physical struggles with sections called “Vision,” in which Cassie imagines an alternate life for herself. The surreality highlights the unbearably visceral way Cassie sees the world, whether she’s helping her father harvest meat with her bare hands from the “red wetness” of the quarry, wandering through fields of throats, or having electric eels applied to her abdomen in the futile hope of becoming normal.
A relentlessly original look at what it means to exist in a female body.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-937512-81-1
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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