An ambitious collection whose relatable characters are too often obscured by a remote style.
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
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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