An entertaining, true coming-of-age adventure about a courageous group.
College buddies decide to re-create Huck Finn’s trip down the Mississippi in Zalesny’s memoir.
Zalesny was a student at Loyola University in Southern California in the late 1950s when a professor wondered if anyone was interested in sailing down the Mississippi River just as Huckleberry Finn did in Mark Twain’s novel. An enthusiastic group of six came up with a plan for their summer break. Inspired by Twain and the recent documentary Kon-Tiki (1950), the friends built raft models and tried them out in the bathtub. Satisfied they could meet the challenge, the “River Rats” headed out onto Route 66, ending up in Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Mark Twain. The boys built their raft out of wood and oil drums, with a lean-to covered in a tarp for shelter. Barely floating but helped by an outboard motor, they set off on the treacherous river hoping to reach New Orleans, with storms, barges, and waves threatening the trip and their survival. They were also concerned about segregation and racism in the South; one member of the group was Latino and another Japanese American. Zalesny’s memoir captures the innocence and the sense of adventure of its young crew while always remaining aware of the difficulties of such an ambitious undertaking. With six egos on a small raft there was a lot of bickering, and in terms of the narrative, some characters aren’t developed as well as the others. But despite their slow progress, they were determined to succeed. Zalesny stays true to the realities of this excursion, which is a dirty, muddy, and dangerous affair. One of many involving passages highlights the infamous, cursed quasi-island that is the southernmost town in Illinois. (“Cairo was dying a slow lingering death; its prolonged death rattle was practically obscene.”) It didn’t all go according to plan, but their collective achievement is worth the read.
An entertaining, true coming-of-age adventure about a courageous group.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66291-916-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but idiosyncratic combination of fiction, art, and political writing.
A debut work argues for a basic-income policy using the tale of a Lebanese woman in America.
Growing up in Beirut, LouLou has a traditional family that discourages any behavior it deems sexual or inappropriate. The Lebanese civil war is raging and religious fervor is on the rise. Organizations like Hezbollah insist that Muslim women wear hijabs. “Uninformed about sexuality at the age of sixteen,” LouLou muses, “I didn’t know the name for vagina in my own Arabic language, nor in my second and third languages, French and English.” At the age of 20, she and her siblings leave the country to live with an uncle in Austin, Texas, where she begins to take college classes. There, she finds herself in an arranged marriage to Maher, a Lebanese man, while in love with an American named Rafael, who turns out to be keeping secrets from her. Feeling as if she has no control over her life, she runs away from her family only to end up homeless, broke, and trapped in an abusive relationship. Interspersed with LouLou’s story are brief essays on the topic of basic income, which Nassif argues would mitigate or prevent many of the problems that afflict LouLou and people like her. The author’s prose is urgent and conversational, whether narrating LouLou’s trials or opining on the necessity of basic income. “If the poor women and men of suburban Beirut had a basic income,” Nassif writes, “many would become free to choose their authentic path without others deciding it for them. Many of these Lebanese women wouldn’t have covered themselves with a hijab or a chador in order to marry and receive income from the Hezb.” Accompanying the text are several striking, full-color illustrations by the author, depicting surreal visions of sexuality and human relationships. It’s an odd, slightly unstable mix of genres. LouLou’s story is memoiristic, without the normal shape of a novel, and the basic-income material, while well argued, feels almost like a non sequitur. Even so, the work cumulatively offers a remarkable portrait of a woman whose well-being is constantly threatened by the caprices of the men around her.
An intriguing but idiosyncratic combination of fiction, art, and political writing.Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-692-07136-6
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Noon & Ta', LLC
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.
In this novel, a young woman wrestles with the death of her older brother and gets lost in a shapeless ennui.
Eleanor Lihte encounters tragedy as a young girl—her older brother, Jamie, dies in a car accident when he is only 18 years old. As a result, her own life becomes entrapped in a state of permanent shiftlessness—she is overcome by boredom and an aching loneliness. Her family manages the tragedy through a studied silence and, in the case of her mother, a cruel incomprehension and lack of empathy for Eleanor’s own suffering: “You’ve always been such a sweet girl. I don’t understand why things have been so hard for you.” When Eleanor is not working as a lifeguard, an uninspiring job—she and her peers are “more like seminude janitors than heroes”—she spends her time sewing and crying. She finally musters enough energy to move from California to Arizona in order to study to become a teacher, but she continues to find the purpose of existence bewildering and to feel that her life is a failure. Nevertheless, Eleanor is reluctant to return to her “tiny homeland, the world of limited possibilities she knew,” and seeks out counsel from various figures, including a born-again spiritual guru, a psychic, and, finally, a therapist.
Toy intelligently conveys Eleanor’s emotional desolation and her benumbed inability to feel pleasure. But the author’s writing sometimes strains too laboriously for lyrical heights and instead achieves a curious eccentricity: “One Sunday sitting at her roommate’s kitchen table waiting for her mother to call,” Eleanor “read a book about evolution. She was hoping to evolve—to become a scaled amphibian heading back toward the water or a bright yellow duck.” The plot is as sluggish as the protagonist—not much happens, which of course makes sense given the morbid torpor that infects Eleanor. Toy’s prose deftly captures her languor—it even parallels it—but the result is sometimes closer to a portrait of melancholy than an engaging story. Still, readers will empathize with Eleanor as she deals with a soporific lethargy. Yet sometimes that tedium is broken with gibberish. Consider this excerpt from a letter Eleanor writes to a former teacher: “I am writing not only to apologize, but to offer you the combination that will unleash the ringing sound inside my telephone. You forgot, I am sure, to ask for it. You are forgetting also, I am sure, to ask when I am coming to visit. Unfortunately, I am tied to my supply of French fries and white bread and will not be coming soon.” Eleanor finally begins to recover from her lassitude, partly as a result of therapy, and comes to grip with the human condition she previously resisted. Her ultimate revelation, though, seems a bit trite—she finds solace in recognizing that others are far more “dysfunctional” than she is.
An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-301-4
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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