by T. Sean Steele ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2018
Inventive, funny, grotesque, and ribald—a book with something for everyone as long as no one demands that it makes sense.
A collection of dated diary-style entries that come together to form nothing quite as conclusive as a novel, Steele’s debut chronicles a coming-of-age story for the surrealist in us all.
A young man from the La Grange suburbs of Chicago is embarking on a trip to LA, where he will live with his sister, Kim. Only his legs have stopped working in psychosomatic protest. Only there is a talking mold-mouth in the corner of his bedroom ceiling that has colonized his brain and established a “private line to [his] unconscious” via spores. Only the season inside the house no longer matches the season outside the house, and his father may not be real. Things don’t get any easier out west. Kim comes home with a pet which appears to be a “genetic hybrid dream portal canine-baby escapee” and clogs the kitchen drain with its teeth. The little black pills that make your “brain feel carbonated” also call into existence a norm-core hallucination named Larry who lurks about tepidly. Laurie, the narrator’s girlfriend, dumps him by moving to their landlord’s building in France, one of the many buildings he maintains around the world by “hand-pick[ing his] tenants to create perfect counterparts of the same building in each country.” Also, there is a decorative skull paperweight that has eaten the narrator’s soul. Also, his legs—replacement parts bestowed upon him by the mold-mouth back in La Grange—have started to visibly rot. Each segment of this bizarro novel is crafted as a speed-of-light vignette—a brief pulse that illuminates the sordid, the unsavory, the cruel, and the hilarious burden of the everyday. This project was originally conceived of as a blog, launched in 2013, and the results here still read like compiled entries in a medium that requires neither context nor the development of character, theme, motif, or any of the other typical hallmarks of a novel. The result is a sublimely contemporary study of a universal truth: Growing up is weird to do.
Inventive, funny, grotesque, and ribald—a book with something for everyone as long as no one demands that it makes sense.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944700-60-7
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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