Mother Goose, goosed.
Wickedly tart reductions of classic tales, plus a few new ones.
The adaptation of fairy tales and nursery rhymes is not uncommon. The brothers Grimm did so in early 19th-century Germany, and the past century witnessed scads of American retellings, ranging from the sanitized works of Disney to Anne Sexton’s bracingly feminist Transformations, published in 1971. Where Perrault, Grimm and Sexton sought as much to educate as to entertain the reader, Moore satirizes high moralism and the forced “happily ever after” conclusions by imbuing his tales with often-crude humor and modern colloquialisms. “Puss In Boots,” for example, in which an industrious cat elevates his master’s social position, follows much of the original tale’s storyline but also includes vulgar details: “That night, the King feasted on the rabbit, but got a case of the shits so bad it kept him up the whole night.” Other tales, while less graphic, are equally humorous, if occasionally sophomoric and plagued by poor grammar. In “The Village Constructor,” Geofferson, a raccoon charged with realizing the visions of others in his village (a “vision constructor”), grows tired of having to construct the self-aggrandizing visions of the horse Jaquers, whose latest prophecy is of a big ball of light bringing him the gift of sight. Instead of reproducing this epiphany as dictated, “Geofferson created out of wood, Jaquers reaching out to the light and the light handing Jaquers a pair of sunglasses.” Other tales, such as “Ramses the Fraidy Cat” and “A Tragedy of Errors,” demonstrate an absurdity reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, albeit minus the zany wit.
Mother Goose, goosed.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-600-47021-1
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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