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THE MUSHROOM MAN

Name: THE MUSHROOM MAN
Author: Sophie Powell
ISBN: 0-399-14963-5

by Sophie Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2003

A charming and thought-provoking tale that walks the line between fantasy and reality with all the skill of...

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An engaging debut about a family reunion that leads to a disappearance.

Charlotte and Beth weren’t born to privilege, but their parents worked hard to give them every advantage, which counts for a lot in England. That’s why Charlotte found it so hard to forgive her sister for having—as she saw it—thrown away her expensive education and careful upbringing to marry a worthless carpenter who took her away from the civilized world (i.e., London’s West End) and moved her to the hinterlands of Wales. It was so hurtful, in fact, that Charlotte could not bring herself to write, call, or communicate in any way with Beth after her marriage—even though Beth continued to write. After Beth’s dreadful husband died, however, Charlotte found it in herself to forgive, and she accepted Beth’s invitation to visit her in Wales. At first the reunion was a success: Charlotte never spoke of her late brother-in-law, and her six-year-old daughter Lily hit it off splendidly with Beth’s eleven-year-old triplets Amy, Jude, and Samantha. Amy, blessed with a gift for storytelling, delighted Lily with a long narrative about the “Mushroom Man,” a kindly hermit who invented mushrooms as miniature umbrellas for the fairies to keep them dry in the rain. Lily was so taken with the story that she insisted that she’d met the Mushroom Man and began to take long solitary rambles looking for him. Charlotte’s unease at her daughter’s wild imaginings turns to outright terror when Lily disappears one morning without a trace. The police are summoned to investigate what looks like a kidnapping, but the triplets wonder whether their stories about the Mushroom Man might have somehow come true—and they round up all the children of the neighborhood to take matters into their own hands.

A charming and thought-provoking tale that walks the line between fantasy and reality with all the skill of tightrope-artist. The British-born Powell, now an NYU grad student, has made a splendid start.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2003

ISBN: 0-399-14963-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

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.