THE JUSTUS GIRLZ

Name: THE JUSTUS GIRLZ
Author: Slim Lambright
ISBN: 0-06-018476-0

by Slim Lambright ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2001

A well-drawn cast and lively prose effectively balance this realistic portrait of the hardships and triumphs of black urban...

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A rollicking, exuberant debut, peopled with the likes of Monsieur Daddy Baby, Peaches, and Bay Girl, offers a look into Philadelphia’s African-American community.

Beginning with the mysterious murder of Peaches, found shot to death at 43 on her front porch, the narrative soon introduces three childhood friends reunited at her funeral. Tough Sally Mae, proper Jan, and beautiful Roach, along with Peaches, formed the Justus Girlz, a drill team created out of their need to succeed at something on their own terms. Life later took them in different directions—Sally Mae became a civil rights activist, Jan married and started her own business, after a failed marriage Roach converted to Islam—but when they once again come together they find their youthful bond is strong enough to get them through midlife’s new set of challenges. (Widowed Jan is suicidal; Roach is in a custody battle with her former husband.) The story's at its best when re-creating the sights and sounds of black Philadelphia in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Peaches, a prostitute’s daughter, is shuttled off to Uncle Elmo, an upstanding policeman who molests her, then rescued by eccentric cross-dresser Vaa, who makes sure she's safely placed with Jan’s family. But the damage is done: Peaches begins drinking and is pregnant before she leaves high school. The flashbacks follow the ups and downs of all the girls’ lives and all the odd characters that accompany them. The past intrudes further on the present when Sally Mae learns she may be charged with the murder of an old boyfriend from the days when she was an L.A. go-go dancer known as Mustang Sally. Together again, with Peaches’s feisty spirit guiding them (plus a little voodoo help from a relative down South), the three remaining Justus Girlz prevail, proving the suitability of their name.

A well-drawn cast and lively prose effectively balance this realistic portrait of the hardships and triumphs of black urban life.

Pub Date: July 16, 2001

ISBN: 0-06-018476-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.