Reid’s one-man campaign to resurrect the 18th- and 19th-century novel is a campaign well worth enlisting in. Don’t miss...
Reid departs from his popular Moosepath Chronicles (Daniel Plainway, 2000, etc.) with this first of a new series focusing on “the struggle between proprietors and settlers” in central Maine during the post–Revolutionary War years.
The former were Loyalists in possession of land granted to them by the English king; the latter, defiant homesteaders who called themselves “Liberty men” and raised a series of small wars against their wealthy oppressors. Into that volatile conflict steps the eponymous hero, a stalwart 17-year-old lad whose recently widowed mother has set him the task of finding his long-lost uncle (of whom Peter had never heard, and who is not his uncle, but the rival who had lost beautiful Rosemund Black to Peter’s father Silas Loon). Before a chastened Peter returns home, he’ll have shared an odyssey with traveling preacher and book peddler Zachariah Leach, enjoyed the hospitality of the ineffably Dickensian Clayden family (dead-ringers for the clan of David Copperfield’s Peggotty), helped rescue a runaway girl from the scoundrel bent on appropriating her, and, in a climactic march on the Wiscasset town jail, found himself buffeted between allegiances to both the Liberty men and their enemies and apprised of the truth of Parson Leach’s admonition that there is often truth on both sides of a quarrel. The story sputters a bit early on, and slows perilously as Reid concentrates numbingly on the Clayden brood’s heartiness and jollity. But it recovers nicely as urgent events grasp its characters’ attention (and ours). Peter is a splendid hero, and Zachariah Leach (a sage amalgam of Don Quixote and Fielding’s Parson Adams) whets the appetite for obviously forthcoming further adventures in a “chronicle” that thus far smoothly assimilates the influences of the aforementioned David Copperfield, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and miscellaneous dutifully acknowledged historical sources.
Reid’s one-man campaign to resurrect the 18th- and 19th-century novel is a campaign well worth enlisting in. Don’t miss Peter Loon.Pub Date: July 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03052-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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