Intricate, if sometimes-whiny, portraits of Portland’s young and restless.
McGrouchpants (Flash Fiction for the Age of Trump, 2017, etc.) delivers a collection of short stories about 20- and 30-somethings in Portland, Oregon.
Each story in this collection begins with an image of a tarot card, juxtaposed with a title (such as “Portland Fiction Writer [Card #0: The Fool]”). The stories take readers on a journey through 21st-century Portland and all its glory of coffee shops, Metropolitan Area Express Light Rail stops, and Powell’s Bookstore readings. The characters consist largely of overeducated, underpaid people who’ve settled in the city, armed with heartfelt opinions on bands (My Bloody Valentine and R.E.M., to name a few) and the correct brand of cigarettes (American Spirit). Although many find themselves working jobs they dislike, such as the young man who answers phones for General Motors in “Keeping the World at Bay [Card #12: The Hanged Man],” they are determined, in one way or another, to survive. The scenes of characters complaining in and about coffee shops don’t always offer the most thrilling prose. But the collection is at its best when taking readers beyond such obvious places of caffeinated, rainy Northwest woe. In “Down and Out in the Portland in Oregon [Card #11: Justice],” for instance, the narrator finds himself in jail for an extended period, and he must try to pass the days as best he can with selections from the prison library. It’s enlightening to see someone at the mercy of such an indifferent system—particularly when they already have such a distrust of the world’s systems. In “Jessica Consults Her Clipboard [Card #7: The Chariot],” a young woman clings to her job going door to door for a nonprofit organization, and it’s shown to be a nerve-wracking way to make a living. All told, it’s easy to skewer a place that prides itself on its weirdness but these stories get to the heart of the people who make up that very weirdness and often create nuanced and lasting impressions.
Intricate, if sometimes-whiny, portraits of Portland’s young and restless.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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