After reading Heim's amazing fictional debut (he is also the author of Saved from Drowning, a poetry collection) only one question remains: How will he ever top this? In a small Kansas town in 1981, a Little League coach is sexually abusing his young charges. His favored target and star player is Neil McCormick, a tough little kid who at eight has already begun thumbing through his mother's Playgirls and believes that his relationship with the coach is true love. At the same time, Brian Lackey is found one day inside the crawl space under his family's house with a nosebleed and no memory of the preceding five hours. The two boys then take vastly different paths. Neil becomes a small-time hustler and petty thief, while Brian, a withdrawn boy with a strong interest in UFOs, comes to believe that the blank spot in his memory results from having been abducted by aliens. Heim rescues this from being a simple story of A versus B by telling it through different voices, so that Brian himself tells how he is chased from a church-sponsored haunted house by some former Little League pals who harass him, but it is his older sister who in one brief chapter explains how solitary he is and how he receives cruel phone calls from other kids. Heim is truly a master of creating different cadences and personalities while still maintaining just the right amount of consistency. He also has created fully believable, troubling human characters. One Halloween, Neil and his best friend, Wendy Peterson, kidnap a marginally retarded boy and set off bottle rockets by having the boy hold them in his mouth and then lighting them. When he's injured and they are afraid he'll tell on them, Neil quickly soothes him the only way he knows how, with oral sex. This is a disturbing book in many ways, but a worthwhile one, and even better, an exquisitely written one. As searing and unforgettable as an electric shock.
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017175-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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