A probing, sometimes-intriguing summer’s tale.
A coming-of-age novel follows a young woman searching for a direction in her life.
In the late 1980s, Lee Bauer returns home to Toledo, Ohio, after flunking out of her first year of college. Lee’s grades suffered not from a dearth of intelligence, but a lack of motivation; she became uninterested in school and “flaked” on her homework. She’s lost her connection with longtime friend Courtney—who seemed to thrive in her first year at college—and is burned out by the social scene in Toledo, full of fellow ne’er-do-wells getting high at house parties, like Derrick, a muscular pothead who’s coming off a tough breakup. To pay back her parents—her gruff father, a postman, and her weary mother, a waitress—Lee finds a job at an ice cream factory, toiling eight hours a day packaging products on an assembly line. While the position eventually becomes mindless to her, she makes friends with some of her fellow shift workers: Paul, a gossip hound; Ned, a family man; Kevin, a younger worker with eyes for Lee; and Kris, a witty, fascinating woman. As Lee starts to form new bonds, she also begins to more fully explore her desire for women, something she had only briefly indulged in before. As the summer progresses, Lee must confront her listlessness and find a life for herself, lest she fall into the trap of working at the factory full time. Yost’s (Votives, 2017, etc.) prose is meditative, imbuing the milieu of the small city with existential weight. Lee is well-developed as a central character, sadly realistic about her hometown (“Toledo never had anything to offer teenagers or college kids…they were the lost generation redone. In Toledo, we sought dark woods and abandoned alleys in which to get stoned or screwed, then faced the endless problem of what to do after burning the joint or buttoning the pants. Prospects were bleak for the unimaginative”). Her quest for meaning is full of mistakes and setbacks as well as illuminating steps toward clarity, particularly in discovering her sexuality. The rest of the characterization is a bit uneven—Lee’s father and Kris have captivating, rounded characters while Lee’s mother and sister, for instance, can feel static. The plot comes to a subtle, if uneasy, end, which is fitting for Lee’s character but will likely be somewhat frustrating for readers.
A probing, sometimes-intriguing summer’s tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9984146-0-7
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Radial Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though all the surface elements are in place, Picoult falters in her exploration of what turns a quiet kid into a murderer.
Picoult’s 14th novel (after The Tenth Circle, 2006, etc.) of a school shooting begins with high-voltage excitement, then slows by the middle, never regaining its initial pace or appeal.
Peter Houghton, 17, has been the victim of bullying since his first day of kindergarten, made all the more difficult by two factors: In small-town Sterling, N.H., Peter is in high school with the kids who’ve tormented him all his life; and his all-American older brother eggs the bullies on. Peter retreats into a world of video games and computer programming, but he’s never able to attain the safety of invisibility. And then one day he walks into Sterling High with a knapsack full of guns, kills ten students and wounds many others. Peter is caught and thrown in jail, but with over a thousand witnesses and video tape of the day, it will be hard work for the defense to clear him. His attorney, Jordan McAfee, hits on the only approach that might save the unlikable kid—a variation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by bullying. Thrown into the story is Judge Alex Cormier, and her daughter Josie, who used to be best friends with Peter until the popular crowd forced the limits of her loyalty. Also found dead was her boyfriend Matt, but Josie claims she can’t remember anything from that day. Picoult mixes McAfee’s attempt to build a defense with the mending relationship of Alex and Josie, but what proves a more intriguing premise is the response of Peter’s parents to the tragedy. How do you keep loving your son when he becomes a mass murderer? Unfortunately, this question, and others, remain, as the novel relies on repetition (the countless flashbacks of Peter’s victimization) rather than fresh insight. Peter fits the profile, but is never fully fleshed out beyond stereotype. Usually so adept at shaping the big stories with nuance, Picoult here takes a tragically familiar event, pads it with plot, but leaves out the subtleties of character.
Though all the surface elements are in place, Picoult falters in her exploration of what turns a quiet kid into a murderer.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7434-9672-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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