Almost overripe with swampy menace, but compelling and original.
Poisonous reptiles and pitiless Mafiosi menace a man trying to redeem his shell-shocked brother and re-craft a lumberyard in 1920s Louisiana.
Far from the pleasures of the Jazz Age and the comforts of his wealthy Pittsburgh home, straight-shooting Randolph Aldridge faces evil on a scale to match the worst of the world war that drove his older brother Byron round the bend. Louisiana native Gautreaux (Welding With Children, 1999, etc.) knows his bayous and uses them to bring high tension to this story of vicious crime and equally vicious punishment. After fleeing civilization for a life in the West, Byron has turned up as a constable on the family’s lumbering operation at the end of the creaky railroads east of New Orleans. Randolph, too young to have been in the war, follows his domineering father’s orders to take over the messy operation and bring Byron back into the fold, a tall order. The roughnecks felling the ancient trees are a brutal lot who spend their wages at a Mafia owned tavern, routinely razoring each other. Byron has managed to impose a sort of legal presence, but he himself is a boozer, haunted by slaughter of the Great War. Randolph imposes order on the operation, but makes little progress with Byron, and he quickly makes enemies of the tavern owners. The little comfort to be found in this hellhole come from Randolph’s nearly white housekeeper May, whose ticket out of the swamp is to be a white child, if she can just get pregnant by one of the brothers, and then from the arrival of Randolph’s wife Lillian, who shows surprising strength, learning to shoot cottonmouths and acquiring a taste for the local cuisine. As the virgin forest shrinks, the mob comes slithering through the undergrowth and the Aldridges must face them down with a tiny force of mill hands.
Almost overripe with swampy menace, but compelling and original.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41474-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
