Darkly hilarious and weirdly beguiling.
Tandy Caide, a dedicated CPA in small-town America, can handle the complexities of everyone’s tax returns. But can she handle an affair with the new vocational agriculture teacher?
Ash’s debut novel brilliantly captures the slanted quirkiness of a Midwest full of small-business owners and exploding home-methamphetamine labs. For the last 25 years, Tandy has striven to live a life of integrity, always conscious of her role in the economic stability of the town. She has quarterly lunches with the Order of the Pessimists, a sodality helmed by her late father’s grumpy friends Doc and Huff, who lovingly criticize her like a daughter. Partly that’s because Huff practically disowned his own daughter, Barb, when she ran off just before high school graduation and came back pregnant. As a waitress, she’s raised Hope alone. She did pretty well until the night of this year's high school musical, Annie, when a rather inebriated Hope played a rather violent Ms. Hannigan. No longer welcome in the regular high school, Hope joins the Vo-Ag class. The night of the musical was also the night Tandy met the Vo-Ag teacher, occasionally known by his given name of Kenny Tischer. Soon Tandy and the strange Vo-Ag teacher, who wears not only a ponytail, but also wool man clogs, have embarked on a passionate romance. Meanwhile, Tandy’s obese husband, Gerald, checks himself into a mental health facility, and Hope seems to have picked up a shady job with a shady farmhand. With staccato phrasing and acerbic observations about the mundane foolishness of everyone’s lives, Ash keenly captures Tandy’s dry wit. Tandy doesn’t simply work as a CPA; she possesses an accountant’s soul, as hilariously evinced by her tallying the costs and benefits of waving to her clients and chaperoning the Vo-Ag students.
Darkly hilarious and weirdly beguiling.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-96-5
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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