Weird and uncomfortable and glorious—just like adolescence.
More misfits from the author of Girlchild (2012).
Being a teen is tough on everyone, but Helen Dedleder has it particularly hard. She lives in Rosary, California, a tiny refinery town so conservative that internet access is circumscribed. What knowledge she has of the outside world comes via radio broadcasts from Sky, a nearby city. She lives with her devoutly evangelical father, but she works at the shop where her Aunt Bev tells fortunes and offers other, more intimate, services. She is infatuated with Bird Doncaster, a classic bad boy who also happens to be her potential stepbrother. She is best friends with Winthrop Epsworthy, until Win falls in love with her. At every turn, Helen is pulled between irreconcilable opposites. Sometimes this tension propels her to make bad decisions. Sometimes she makes bad decisions without any help at all. It is, perhaps, easier to appreciate this novel by not thinking of it as a novel. It’s written in the first person, there’s a lot more telling than showing, and there are vast narrative territories that are barely explored. Read as a collection of very short fictions, though, the book coalescences as a melancholy, triumphant, slightly magical coming-of-age tale. Hassman creates a world that seems to be defined through stark dualities, but the story tends toward chaos in the sense that no certainty, no opposition, goes unquestioned. Things fall apart. Insiders and outsiders trade places. The powerful become powerless. At the same time, the story—the collection of stories—moves toward unity, self-actualization, and transcendence. Helen learns who she is and what she wants. She lets the people who love her help her. And she and her loser friends become something much more than the sum of their parts.
Weird and uncomfortable and glorious—just like adolescence.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-16446-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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