This is a stoic view of mother-daughter love: an unsentimental reflection on both the tribulations and the importance of...
Three generations of women seek to forge independent identities while struggling to understand their roles in this book about mothers and daughters, marriage, education, and risk.
Matson (The Tree-Sitter, 2006) writes vignettelike chapters that detail a sweeping family history beginning in 1930s India, where Elsie is married to J.N., a strict Mennonite missionary. “India keeps reducing [Elsie] to a person who knows nothing,” but her daughter, Kathryn, questions the world directly and moves through it fluidly. While Elsie averts her eyes from uncertainty and a world that seems to belong to men, Kathryn is curious and engaged. Unfortunately, Elsie dies early, of a stroke. Kathryn, upon returning to the United States, feels detached from her family, education, and culture: “The gulf between India and America was so wide she could scarcely see past it.” She feels like “a person awkwardly between worlds—India and Illinois, Mennonite and modern,” and so she strikes out on her own for Oregon. She meets Carl, a confident stranger who promises to be the antithesis to everything she’s lived before. Unfortunately, Carl harbors some secrets. “All [Kathryn] wants,” though, “is that simple feeling of belonging.” They marry and have children, but their marriage begins to crumble under the weight of those secrets. Matson returns to the push and pull of safety versus desire. It is Kathryn’s daughter, Samantha, whose life becomes about both taking risk and keeping the family together in a meaningful way. Matson’s chapters, each of which jumps forward in time, conclude with an especially poignant reflection on aging, as Samantha cares for her dying mother in her final days.
This is a stoic view of mother-daughter love: an unsentimental reflection on both the tribulations and the importance of filial connection.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-95-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
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
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