A well-told coming-of-age story for a late bloomer, which could have used a round of restructuring.
A law school grad endures unwelcome career changes, a dire relationship with his father and a precarious marriage in Jones’ (After Isaactown, 2011) latest drama.
Life after law school for John Howard meant work as a door-to-door salesman; his biggest seller was the Portapotty. But when he loses his job and moves back in with his parents, his father’s spiteful behavior convinces John to secure employment elsewhere. What follows is a surprising shift in careers and a volatile romance with Kathy, another lawyer, all in the hope that he can make a better life for himself, away from his father’s control. Jones’ appealing novel works best outside the courtroom: John’s wedding and the first weeks of marriage, or even his search for a job, are far more enthralling and thematically relevant than a lengthy courtroom scene with John sitting second chair and giving an unimpressive performance. The convincing father-son dynamic lingers even without the father’s presence, and after being passive in most of his relationships, both business and personal, John has an intriguing reversal of his father/husband role. The striking narrative style often reads like unfiltered access to John’s mind; one of the most notable moments features John thinking of his father while his boss speaks, with John having to interrupt his thought process so he can listen to what’s being said. The narrative occasionally slips into Yoda-speak, which can be jarring: “Eerie, it was,” or “The worst of times, this was.” Thanks to refreshing humor, John’s predicament isn’t as depressing as it might have been: He avoids telling Kathy that he’s lost his job for as long as possible; his marriage proposal has a hilariously awkward response; and a young, exasperating passenger makes the plane ride to their honeymoon destination nearly unbearable. The chronology has some holes in it, though: John is 26 in 1987, but a flashback to 1962 has his then-age as 8, giving him a birthdate of possibly 1954, which would make him 32 or 33 in 1987.
A well-told coming-of-age story for a late bloomer, which could have used a round of restructuring.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477429372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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