A colorful, exuberant romp with an appealing fortune-hunting duo.
Two California teenagers search for an ancestor’s treasure in this comic novel that crosscuts between contemporary and Gold Rush eras.
Spivey Spillane, age 20, arrives in the California Gold Rush town of Skunks Dance on the trail of Alabama Sam. Spillane first met this elusive trickster when he showed up to swipe the Bible with a treasure map that was found on a Spaniard who had arrived, then died, at the Spillane family farm in Tennessee. The story then shifts to modern-day Skunks Dance, introducing teen protagonists Jettison “Jet” Allan-Ashwood, son of circus acrobats, and Amanda Spillane, part of the still-fortune-seeking Spillane tribe. These high schoolers initially seem to dislike each other, with Amanda sending a rock through Jet’s house and Jet managing to blow up her car. Yet the teens soon join forces to follow new leads regarding the long-sought-after Spillane gold, including examining the insides of the never-completed model for a statue of the headless Spillane (as he was found long ago) now erected in the town plaza, and climbing up Skunks Dance’s nearby Spanish fortification ruins. More details on both quests then unspool in alternating chapters, with Spillane led through teasing traps by Alabama Sam (including, at one point, being forced to wear a tutu) and the teens, with Jet’s wisecracking younger sister Gina sometimes in tow, coming to suspect town elders of serious, indeed murderous, wrongdoing. By the story’s end, unexpected fates and directions for Spillanes both past and present are revealed. Karp (Radium Baby, 2013) imaginatively combines absurdism and adventure with snarky teenage sleuthing and a sense of the macabre in this ambitious sophomore effort. The Gold Rush parts of the narrative are particularly surreal and striking, with the to-the-death dynamic between Sam and Spillane taking on a doppelgänger dimension. The romances are also entertainingly offbeat, with Spillane acquiring a feisty, gunslinging female cohort, and Amanda becoming attracted to Jet’s clinging ex-girlfriend Nina. While generally amusing, this tale’s comic details are occasionally overplayed, such as the time spent on a subplot about Jet’s father being charged with “sexual assault with a candy Wolverine.”
A colorful, exuberant romp with an appealing fortune-hunting duo.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9892630-6-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Remora House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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