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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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