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BOB HONEY SINGS JIMMY CRACK CORN

Name: BOB HONEY SINGS JIMMY CRACK CORN
Author: Sean Penn
ISBN: 978-1-64428-058-4

by Sean Penn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.

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Actor/director Penn continues his foray into fiction with this shaggy dog yarn of a secret agent–turned–freelance dispenser of justice.

Bob Honey is a man with a plan. When last we saw him, in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018), the enigmatic killer was being hauled off to the pen; now, having “opted for fugitive flight,” he’s the subject of a manhunt. He goes blackface, a disguise that a grimace-inducing fellow agent in like garb sees right through, first muttering, “When a black man use soap, his skin dry ashen,” then dropping the patois to say, “You just look like a crazy white guy with tar all over his face.“ Honey tries again, this time going in drag on the Acela train to Washington and speaking in falsetto to a senator who once did right by the downtrodden but then became a supporter of the “flim-flamming finger fucker” who won the 2016 election, for which, Bob thinks, he deserves death by mallet, Bob’s favorite instrument. Penn risks crossing over the boundaries of political incorrectness at many points, from those incidents to the very title of the book (which comes from a song of slave resistance that celebrates “cranium cracked and plashed on a pulverizing plantation stone” ). He’ll likely be tarred as an incorrigible member of the Hollywood elite as his tale winds to its close with the explosive destruction of the White House in a scene that might have been an outtake from Fight Club, spectacular but strange, perfectly in keeping with the feel of the rest of the book. It’s all very much of a piece with its predecessor, complete with sometimes-unnecessary footnotes and bursts of alliterative language (“Trees that seem to masturbate an ejaculation of wounds wishing and longing for Lennon’s laments”) that seem to be there for their own sake rather than to move the story along.

It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64428-058-4

Page Count: 168

Publisher: Rare Bird Books

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.