CALL ME TUESDAY

Name: CALL ME TUESDAY
Author: Leigh Byrne
ISBN: 978-1463690021

by Leigh Byrne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 2012

This true-life-inspired account of child abuse from a monstrous mother is well told but painful to read and premature in its...

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In this slightly fictionalized memoir, a young girl suffers horrific abuse for years after being scapegoated by her disturbed mother.

When Tuesday is 8 years old, her mother undergoes a severe personality change after a frontal-lobe injury. One day she tells the girl she’s in big trouble (Mama won’t say why), so Tuesday must stand with her face against the wall, all day long, every day. Turning around warrants a beating. As time goes on, Tuesday’s punishments for the unsaid crime grow crueler and more bizarre. Soon she has to wear a mask because Mama is tired of looking at her ugly face. Mama forces her to drink curdled milk and eat leftover scraps from everyone else’s meals—gristle, half-chewed meat, soggy cereal. Tuesday must go to school without underpants, or go unwashed, or with ugly, ill- fitting clothes. Throughout the years of mistreatment, her father’s only intervention is to send Tuesday to her grandmother for the summer; the return of school means more beatings, humiliation, isolation and starvation. When Tuesday fights back, at 15, she’s finally sent to live with her aunt. Byrne (Flashes, 2011) conveys a horrifying story “inspired by true-life experience,” according to the jacket copy, and though it’s well-written, it’s also very hard to take because the prose so vividly and evocatively portrays suffering. Even mild examples retain the underlying horror of her situation, as when her starvation compels her to eat paper: Notebook pages are “sweet and starchy”; construction paper is too bitter and spongy; but she loves the school’s toilet paper—“Without any ink, dye, or glue, it tasted pure, and it had more of the woody, almost nut-like flavor I had grown to love.” Also hard to take is her father’s passiveness, partly because Byrne is too easy on him. He tells Tuesday that intervention “could break up the family” and Mama “wouldn’t be able to take care of herself … she can’t even write a check on her own.” After Daddy dies, Mama becomes a nurse and does just fine, but Byrne merely mentions the change. There’s a curious lack of the real anger—rage, even—that would be expected, and no mention of how Tuesday has (or hasn’t) worked through these experiences as an adult. It’s as if the reader is meant to supply those emotions for the writer. Also, the ending doesn’t quite ring true—unlike nearly all that has gone before.

This true-life-inspired account of child abuse from a monstrous mother is well told but painful to read and premature in its resolution.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-1463690021

Page Count: 328

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.