An appealing and original story that gets bogged down in its own originality: it would have worked better had the author...
Canadian Kowalski’s third outing, a follow-up to his debut (Eddie’s Bastard, 1999), offers an engaging, offbeat account of an All-American girl coming of age in a very strange town.
A backwoods village on Lake Erie, Mannville, New York, is the home of 17-year-old Haley Bombauer, who prefers to be called “Flash Jackson.” An inveterate tomboy (“a stuntman trapped in a female body”), Haley is laid up for the summer with a broken leg, sustained when she fell through the roof of her mother’s barn. Her grandmother, a strict Mennonite, lives as a semi-recluse in a cabin in the woods, and Haley is sent to stay with her for part of her recuperation. Grandma had always seemed a bit odd, but Haley soon finds out that she hasn’t guessed the half of it: not only is Grandma a witch, but she’s nearly four hundred years old! And the stream that runs alongside her cabin is the runoff of a sacred well. Has Haley gone off her rocker? Even if so, she won’t want for company. Her mother has a sixth sense that allows her to see into the future (as does Haley). Her neighbor Elizabeth Powell is a genteel ex-CIA agent who carries a Luger and speaks in a secret language (“Zammish”) to her friend Letty Horgan (who may also be a witch). There are other typical small-town types in Mannville (village idiot Frankie Grunveldt; Haley’s hunky sweetheart, Adam Schumacher), but they fade toward the background once Haley gets initiated into the craft and sets herself up as an occult healer. Eventually, she comes to see that the real world and the hidden one can coexist peacefully, and she settles down to a happy albeit somewhat odd domesticity with the birth of her son—who certainly has an interesting life ahead of him.
An appealing and original story that gets bogged down in its own originality: it would have worked better had the author pulled out fewer stops.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621136-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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