A first novel featuring a truculent, funny adolescent narrator, one that starts well and that augurs well for the career of...
A gay British teenager delivers a sniping, witty rant à la Holden Caulfield while undergoing romantic and drug-related misadventures, followed by a mild raft of Life Lessons.
Jarold, or “Jazz,” as he’s dubbed himself, is 16, a minor hellion whose carping, unhappily married parents (“a surreal, toned-down, middle-aged version of Sid and Nancy, minus the heroin”) treat every transgression or departure from so-called normalcy as a sign of doom and an occasion for panicked speechmaking. So when his devout younger sister (“The Nun”) rats him out for picking up men in a gay bar, his home life begins to unravel. And when,accompanied by his sidekick Alice (“Al”), Jazz begins running into one of his teachers at the club, and when Alice decides that the rather dumpy teacher is lonely and begins canvassing the place for dates for him, the troubles mount. It gets worse: Jazz seduces a man who has scruples about Jazz’s age; in disentangling himself from a schoolgirl’s crush, he accidentally outs himself and falls prey to bullies. Davis handles these early pages with sardonic wit and energy, and in a convincing, profane teen argot (no “phonies” in this lingo). And the author wisely soft-pedals the hints of vulnerability. But when a fellow misfit and former semi-friend of Jazz’s named Fabian—who’s graduated to knife-wielding and halfhearted neo-Nazism and showing off ink-pen tattoos to “impressionable molestables” in the schoolyard—first rescues Jazz from the homophobe tough guys and then commits suicide, the tale begins its slide into YA cliché. Suddenly, the narrative is littered with clumsy coincidences, crying jags, therapy sessions. It turns out (gasp!) that Jazz’s irony is a mask, and beneath that mask, tartness and sex and drugs aside, lurks a sensitive soul.
A first novel featuring a truculent, funny adolescent narrator, one that starts well and that augurs well for the career of its young author (born in 1980), but that eventually succumbs to formula.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-294-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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