A standard belated-coming-of-ager, but nicely worked out and genuinely affecting—even if too long and sometimes plodding.
Cincinnati columnist Sims debuts with the ordeal of a young woman who returns to her childhood home to put her family ghosts to rest.
Thirty-year-old Lucy Greene still has a lot of unfinished business when it comes to her family. A photography curator at a midwestern museum, she is too busy with her own life—finishing her master’s thesis, planning exhibitions, etc.—to find much time to ruminate on the past. But when she is called down to Florida to nurse her 58-year-old mother, Fay, through the last stages of lung cancer, Lucy finds that she has to make her reckonings pretty fast. Apart from the obvious shock of her mother’s disease, there is the inexplicable behavior of Lucy’s older sister Anna, who had been alerted to her mother’s condition months earlier (when treatment might still have made a difference) but did absolutely nothing. Always flighty as a child, Anna has grown up to become a full-fledged drunk (now going though rehab for the umpteenth time), but Lucy is not in the forgiving mood and considers her a selfish egomaniac. The greatest shock of all, though, comes when Fay tells Lucy that she is still in touch with their Frank, who disappeared when Lucy was six. A printer’s mechanic, Frank was struck by lightning at the Greenes’ lakeside summerhouse in Canada and became a kind of hapless lunatic as a result. Now Lucy learns that he’s been living in Florida with her aunt Martha ever since. So it seems like a tradeoff, of sorts: Lucy goes to Florida to lose her mother, but she finds her father in the process.
A standard belated-coming-of-ager, but nicely worked out and genuinely affecting—even if too long and sometimes plodding.Pub Date: March 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03290-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
King's newest is a gargantuan summer sausage, at 1144 pages his largest yet, and is made of the same spiceless grindings as ever: banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about his dark butcher shop. The horror this time out is from beyond the universe, a kind of impossible-to-define malevolence that has holed up in the sewers under the New England town of Derry. The It sustains itself by feeding on fear-charged human meat—mainly children. To achieve the maximum saturation of adrenalin in its victims, It presents itself sometimes as an adorable, balloon-bearing clown which then turns into the most horrible personal vision that the victims can fear. The novel's most lovingly drawn settings are the endless, lightless, muck-filled sewage tunnels into which it draws its victims. Can an entire city—like Derry—be haunted? King asks. Say, by some supergigantic, extragalactic, pregnant spider that now lives in the sewers under the waterworks and sends its evil mind up through the bathtub drain, or any drain, for its victims? In 1741, everyone in Derry township just disappeared—no bones, no bodies—and every 27 years since then something catastrophic has happened in Derry. In 1930, 170 children disappeared. The Horror behind the horrors, though, was first discovered some 27 years ago (in 1958, when Derry was in the grip of a murder spree) by a band of seven fear-ridden children known as the Losers, who entered the drains in search of It. And It they found, behind a tiny door like the one into Alice's garden. But what they found was so horrible that they soon began forgetting it. Now, in 1985, these children are a horror novelist, an accountant, a disc jockey, an architect, a dress designer, the owner of a Manhattan limousine service, and the unofficial Derry town historian. During their reunion, the Losers again face the cyclical rebirth of the town's haunting, which again launches them into the drains. This time they meet It's many projections (as an enormous, tentacled, throbbing eyeball, as a kind of pterodactyl, etc.) before going through the small door one last time to meet. . .Mama Spider! The King of the Pulps smiles and shuffles as he punches out his vulgarian allegory, but he too often sounds bored, as if whipping himself on with his favorite Kirin beer for zip.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0451169514
Page Count: 1110
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK TO SCREEN
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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