palace, and the longing of Parvati not only for the dance but for the maharaja’s son, make this a heady and exotic tale....
A powerful new story from the author of Dangerous Skies (1996).
On the day Parvati is born, a terrible cyclone ravages her village and her father is trampled to death by the elephants he trained and loved. Her mother’s milk runs sweet, though, and the infant understands all that is around her. From her birth, she sees the sandalwood her father, Shiva, carved dance in the night, and she hears music in the flames of the fire. Parvati and her mother are feared and shunned, so when a teacher of classical Indian dance comes to invite the now 12-year-old to study with him, Parvati sees not only a chance at her heart’s desire but a way to free her family from poverty. The ascetic and aesthetic structure of the school, where the girls are almost as cloistered and disciplined as nuns, fills Parvati, but her extraordinary gifts still inspire dread in her classmates and isolate her further. Staples weaves a tapestry of Gandhi's India as rich and fragrant as night jasmine. The ritual of the dance, the harshness of mud huts and poverty against the sumptuous environs of the maharaja’s
palace, and the longing of Parvati not only for the dance but for the maharaja’s son, make this a heady and exotic tale. (Fiction.12-14)Pub Date: April 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-36824-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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