An offbeat work of carnivalesque proportions, populated by zany, outspoken, and eccentric personalities.
An ambitious book offers an amalgam of opinion, satire, and character sketch.
Armed with a brain-teasingly bizarre title that foretells its peculiar contents, this volume features a chorus of quirky voices chanting messages of solidarity, gay pride, and anti-homogeneous individualism. The book opens with an anonymous woman’s exquisitely sarcastic rant parodying a social media outlet (“Fakebook”), accusing it of “destroying friendship,” and musing over the digital impermanence of modern culture and communication. She considers herself an “incredible fag hag.” After pondering the significance of fetishes and Nueva Jork life, she acerbically introduces her artistic, gay “fiend-frienemy” Noloso Chushingura and launches a literary fever-dream of colorfully dizzying co-narrators and their sordid escapades. Noloso is a man who is abandoning his longtime residence in “Disneyfied” Nueva Jork for his childhood home, Mucha Nieve. Unsatisfied still, he flees there for wintry “Palin-town,” where no-nonsense, pragmatic Pavlina Perestroika gets into a mysterious 1975 Buick Regal and begins an otherworldly journey to another land yet returns just in time for Bobby Bluetooth’s comedy set at a nearby cafe. Readers searching for some cohesive link to the stories and their kaleidoscope of curious characters may become dumbfounded by the time lesbian Koontessa Klarissa Koontberger introduces her two adopted children “of indeterminate sexuality.” Giovanni Zsazsasky exchanges gay bars for eBay shopping as the ultimate “go-to pacifier in moments of thumb-sucking sadness,” and wand-waving superheroine Dolores The Day-Glo Drag Queen issues orders commanding the end of abusive Jean-Nette The Jet Lag Fag Hag’s life. This is the third book by Canadian fiction writer and visual artist Bird (Hideous Exuberance, 2013, etc.). Thankfully, lurking beneath all of the snarky commentary and cheekiness are honest reflections of contemporary society, including the gay community’s struggle to vanquish shame and the much-protested incremental gentrification of major metropolitan areas. Not all of this oddly creative volume works, however, with some sections dissolving into garbled gibberish and others becoming overpowered by all of Bird’s slapdash wackiness. Overall, the book’s unconventional spellings, sentence fragments, line-drawn chapter headings, and haiku work well in unison to create a devilishly original tableau of true outlandishness with a conscience.
An offbeat work of carnivalesque proportions, populated by zany, outspoken, and eccentric personalities.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-34777-5
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Hysterical Dementia
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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