Despite generic prose and plot, Martha the Pig contains at least a smile or two.
A mischievous pig gets into all sorts of trouble in a mildly amusing animal fantasy.
Martha begins life ignominiously as the runt of the litter. Her brothers and sisters push her aside at mealtimes, further stunting her growth and deepening her hunger. But Aunt Kate is quick to notice that Martha isn’t growing as a healthy pig should. The kind-hearted woman takes a shine to Martha and begins hand-feeding her plump pink shrimp while the others are left to plow through an unsavory blend of scraps and leftovers. Simple humorous illustrations include an obvious nod to Charlotte’s Web: Martha stands in the barnyard door, a spider’s web stretched across one corner. But any similarities between Vosper’s Martha and the children’s classic end here. The adorable hot pink pig depicted in illustrations of baby Martha soon gives way to portraits of a big, bossy and remarkably less-adorable hog. Martha’s antics soon get her into trouble with her fellow farm animals and the doting Aunt Kate. Tom the Turkey doesn’t appreciate Martha’s merciless teasing; she constantly pesters him by pulling at his tail feathers with her teeth. Nor is Aunt Kate impressed with the once vulnerable Martha after the pig goes on a rampage and ruins her backyard party. Aunt Kate’s crime? She forgot to feed Martha her customary shrimp dinner in the frenzy of preparations. A subsequent scene in which Martha attacks a grumpy bull by grabbing at his throat is particularly jarring and inappropriately violent for the book’s intended audience of preschool readers. Why Martha’s destructiveness and selfishness are tolerated for so long is unclear; her behavior toward the other barn animals is, for the most part, so mean-spirited that there is little to endear her to the reader.
Despite generic prose and plot, Martha the Pig contains at least a smile or two.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 17.99
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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