A subtle novel that’s a glowing testament to the enduring power of ideas.
Debut author Post crafts a whimsical tale about an academic’s unexpected walk upon a road less traveled.
Kate Brown, a literature professor who’s an expert on the author Herman Melville, is on the path to academic glory. Harvard University plucked the young Midwesterner from Northwestern to give her a tenure-track position. Then her college’s dean peremptorily informs her that she’ll be filling in for a professor on sabbatical, teaching the freshman seminar on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Kate is taken aback by this development, thinking it’s daunting “for someone who hasn’t experienced the outdoors, except through the windows of a library these past four years, to teach a book about the joys of living in the midst of nature.” However, Kate immerses herself in the topic and is soon aided by one of her students, Heather Channing, who comes from a region called Walden North in rural Vermont. When Kate visits there, Thoreau’s message resonates with her: “Everything is interconnected here. She took a long, slow deep breath to inhale this new insight—a tranquil wholeness.” She soon finds herself torn between two men (and two lifestyles): roguish fellow professor Charles Blake Winthrop Prentiss, the epitome of Harvard snobbishness; and Heather’s father, William, a stoic educator who walked away from Harvard to become the seeming mirror image of Thoreau himself. The novel believably recounts Kate’s transformation from a scholar wed to the theoretical to a person craving all the real-life experiences that a simpler existence has to offer. Post’s characters are well-drawn, although it quickly becomes obvious where her own allegiances lie; after all, she’s a former teacher who lives in a New England setting not unlike Walden North. Her use of italicized passages from Walden in the text seems a little twee and heavy-handed, but it doesn’t greatly diminish the enjoyment of her tale. Overall, her message, emblazoned in Kate’s philosophical journey, will make readers stop and reflect.
A subtle novel that’s a glowing testament to the enduring power of ideas.Pub Date: June 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9961357-6-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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