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14TH

Name: 14TH
Author: Sue Cruise
ISBN: 978-1468145922

by Sue Cruise ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2012

A nostalgic little gem of a novel, with a quietly powerful message.

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In Cruise’s debut novel, the death of a middle-aged Texan’s mother prompts him to reflect upon his childhood.

Linus “Bud” Ritter (named for the Peanuts character) and his siblings gather after their mother’s death shortly before Christmas 2008. Fifty-one-year-old Bud is a real estate agent and his wife, Franny, works at a junior high school. He and Franny discuss mortality and their life choices, including not having children; as a teen, Bud fathered a daughter who was given up for adoption. Before the funeral, he and the surviving Ritter siblings, known as the Nine, reminisce about growing up in the 1960s in Galveston, Texas. Money was tight, but times were good in their little house on 14th Street. Serendipitously, the home’s current owner allows the Nine to wander through the house one last, wondrous time. The author delivers a cohesive account of childhood, warts and all, and the enduring significance of a childhood home. Despite the novel’s brevity, Cruise crafts a realistic relationship among the Ritter kids and especially between Bud and Franny, whose married-couple banter rings true. The book teems with humorous expressions such as, “Christ on a cracker, I think I'm gonna blow!” and “I’m more of a holiday Catholic.” Anecdotes from the Nine’s collective childhood are similarly inventive and include a near-disaster by fire in a Christmas tree fort, averted by “The Patron Saint of Untoasted Children”; “The Legend of Lunchtime Horror”; and a fun-filled flight through a parking lot on a runaway grocery cart. The novel’s occasional serious moments are touching but not maudlin. Among its poignant comments is that today’s children don’t play much outdoors anymore; video games have trumped swings and slides. This novel may hold little appeal for readers in their 20s or early 30s, but it will likely engage and enchant Baby Boomers who remember their childhoods fondly.

A nostalgic little gem of a novel, with a quietly powerful message.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2012

ISBN: 978-1468145922

Page Count: 228

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.