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CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

Name: CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
Author: Ulrick Casimir
ISBN: 978-0-9996869-2-8

STORIES

by Ulrick Casimir ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2018

An ambitious collection whose relatable characters are too often obscured by a remote style.

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Lost souls struggle to establish human connection in these short stories from Casimir (Many Happy Returns, 2017).

Casimir’s protagonists are adrift, many of them surviving on the edges of society, grieving. The book’s finale, its only sci-fi entry, epitomizes Casimir’s thematic interests: a nurse addicted to a futuristic memory-aiding device that keeps her sleepwalking through the night crosses paths with a lonely man hired to sabotage her clinic. Several stories prominently feature imagery of dollar bills passed to and from limos: Characters understand that money, class, and race profoundly shape their lives. The collection’s best two stories, “I Love You, Joe” and “Phantom Power,” both star characters navigating a strange new land. In one, whip-smart teenager Joe butts heads with teachers at his new school, where he’s the only black kid in his AP classes. Joe and his mother mourn the loss of his father and their old life back in Detroit. He eventually decides that getting into a prestigious college will fix things but starts to have doubts after realizing how clueless the adults in his life really are. In the other, a mob wife flees her husband and forges a new identity but never forgets that all things are temporary. Too often, these tales spend more time ruminating on the nature of relationships than developing the flesh and bones of those involved in them. In “Marvin’s Dilemma,” a man longs for his lost lover by remembering his mysterious scent, yet the lover himself remains an abstract figure. It’s no coincidence that “I Love You, Joe,” the collection’s standout, is also its only first-person piece. A far less self-consciously “writerly” style means that Joe’s relationships, challenges, and intelligence shine. Contrast Joe’s observation that his new home contains “Appliances that were solid and working and rusted out but only at the bottom, so you had to kneel and use a flashlight to tell,” with the line from title story “Children of the Night”: “Hard and distant, the full moon floats like glass in the pines, making tight circles of the black needles in the trees.”

An ambitious collection whose relatable characters are too often obscured by a remote style.

Pub Date: April 21, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-9996869-2-8

Page Count: 124

Publisher: Corpus Callosum Press

Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

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Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.