An intriguing tale involving reality show alliances that lacks a strong plot.
Clover imagines the combative contestants of a future reality show in this debut novel.
The year is 2056. Shots Fired in the Melting Pot is meant to be standard, 3-D hologram reality show fare, placing six unlikely roommates together in a New York penthouse to “illustrate ideological differences between passionate people.” The contestants include Litz Rack, a liberal and lascivious plumber with a checkered past; Richard Orton, the editor of Feature Films for Families and a token Republican; Jazzy Auburn Michelle, an extroverted yet insecure comedian; Fassim Johnson, a ruthless paparazzo with little concern for the privacy of others; Cody “CKB” Black, a career criminal with a knack for social media; and Stoney Akuda, a New York cop looking for a reason to deploy deadly force. They are competing for a cash prize, though each also conceals a personal agenda. Things start off with the expected barrage of trash talk and flirtation, but the situation quickly escalates as the producers throw new elements into the series in an attempt to raise the stakes even higher. With the increased spotlight, the personal histories of the contestants are drawn more and more into the mix, complicating their lives both on and off camera. It’s only a matter of time until real shots are fired and the inhabitants of the melting pot are forced to decide which of their rivals might prove most useful as partners. While the premise and futuristic setting offer the promise of satire and heightened high jinks, the novel is rather flat in its execution. Clover routinely overloads his sentences with description and exposition: “Litz noticed an intimate longing creeping across Richard’s adorable Scottish-American face as she finished listening to her voice mail with the stoicism of a true vixen.” The resulting prose is cumbersome and never fully immersive. The dialogue is not nearly as witty as the author wants it to be, and the plot developments feel more contrived as the story proceeds. A late twist doesn’t quite land, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of missed opportunity.
An intriguing tale involving reality show alliances that lacks a strong plot.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-50725-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: No Apologies Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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