Bizarre yet grounded, this book about a male stripper makes for a playful look at the human experience.
A debut novel explores a stranger’s adventures in a surreal land.
The tale of Pozzo begins in a garage situated near an unpaved alley. It is there that two boys dressed as angels and an “impressively large, but not fat, drag queen version of Mae West” wind up conjuring a wondrous creature. After the boys pray and Mae, as she is known, sings a rendition of the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” (accompanied by her drag queen backup singers), a man emerges from a cardboard box. He will become known as Pozzo. Strong, protected by an invisible guardian rabbit, and given to a clunky, anachronistic mode of speaking (as when he explains his dismay at having a guardian rabbit: “I have no understanding that allows for an incorporation of such a guardian”), he is adrift, but not helpless. Taken home by Mae, he forms a close bond with her, though friction develops. While Mae makes her living as a drag artist, Pozzo begins to fear he is dead weight in the relationship (“He had even overheard himself referred to as Mae’s toy boy”). As the decision is made that Pozzo too will perform for money, he winds up blossoming into an incredibly successful male stripper. When he eventually leaves Mae for the potential of even brighter pastures, the only question is just where he might wind up. Peppered with philosophical considerations (a paragraph on Kant includes his concept of “noumena”), offbeat scenes (a conversation between a private investigator and his billy goat assistant results in many “Baa, baa” responses), and a plethora of singing (song lyrics included), the story is decidedly whimsical and dreamlike. Part Rocky Horror Picture Show-style camp, part earnest exploration of what it means to exist, Johnson’s tale takes the reader on a weird though not impossible journey. Broken up into three digestible parts and coming in at under 300 pages, the entire adventure moves just as quickly and confoundedly as a lively floor show. Whether or not readers will take to the mixture of the goofy and the ruminative depends on their tolerance for creatures of many stripes and lots and lots of singing.
Bizarre yet grounded, this book about a male stripper makes for a playful look at the human experience.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5347-0435-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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