A southern boy’s fantasy of coming of age under the guidance of his languorous older aunt could make this a sneaky sleeper.
Watson (Deadly Sweet, 1994, etc.) serves up a nicely packed if sentimental and ultimately melodramatic teenage romp-turned-violent in an Eisenhower-era Florida town.
Here are all the elements of a classic southern horror tale: bored and sex-mad teenagers; early rock-’n’-roll music on car radios; moonshine; and a mean-eyed, laconic sheriff. With his Japanese mother in an insane asylum back in Omaha and his WWII-veteran father unable to care for him, 12-year-old Travis is spending the summer with his Grandma and Grandpa Hollister (Grandpa is also the sheriff) and their savvy, hot-footed 16-year-old daughter, Delia, in Widow Rock, Florida. Despite Travis’s youth, he gets hip to the local mores fast and falls hard for his aunt Delia, whose elusive Natalie Wood beauty and dishy secrets prove the unraveling of several of the local boys. Delia introduces Travis to cruising in her Chevy, skinny-dipping, and the fatal lure of rock’-n’-roll, and he becomes “Killer,” after Jerry Lee Lewis, a name he’ll grow into in a horrifying manner over the summer: The is the summer Travis will become a man by having to protect Delia from herself. Watson’s meticulous, insouciant first-person narrative gains suspense by minuscule degrees, so that what starts as a sweet-tempered parody of a James Dean movie—the local greaser reads The Subterraneans, the kids talk about “dreamboats” and being “cool,” and the big black cook, named Marvadell, is always crying “Humph!” in the kitchen—gradually turns sordid and sharp. Watson toys with southern stereotypes and nostalgia for the days of jukebox music, soda fountains, red Oldsmobiles, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon; and while Travis’s desperately wrong-headed attempts to save Delia pull the story down into a grisly modern psychotherapy, the tale nonetheless provides some delicious page-turning.
A southern boy’s fantasy of coming of age under the guidance of his languorous older aunt could make this a sneaky sleeper.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-4022-0017-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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