A fine tale about the highlights and pitfalls of first love.
Young love takes a beating, or at least a spirited whisking.
Aspiring chef Eric and Anna, a Welsh management intern, both 20, cross paths when she walks into the restaurant where he works. Soon after, they begin an affair beautifully and sensuously described by debut author Christopher. All is passion, playfulness and innocence, and the romance is fully developed with all the accompanying intimacies, joys and missteps. But all is not well. Eric’s confession that he fathered a child and gave it up for adoption disturbs Anna, whose childhood was hardly idyllic either. Abruptly, she announces, the first of many times, that she doesn’t want to see him anymore. Despite her misgivings, the two reconcile, marry and move to Eric’s home state of Oregon and later travel to Wales. But the relationship experiences serious bumps, and Eric returns alone to the States. Over six years, the two part and reunite, only to split again, throughout such diverse settings as the Pacific Northwest, Miami and New York. Whenever Anna calls or appears, Eric quickly caves, abandons his plans and puts his career at risk in the hope of recapturing the magic of their early days together. Their on-again, off-again relationship is so realistically portrayed that, after a few breakups, it becomes agonizingly predictable. Although Anna and Eric pursue their respective careers, they are never fully defined in their relationship to the world; at times both come off as painfully self-absorbed. But perhaps it’s relationship absorption, as if their true intercourse is a journey in and out of the youthful fantasy of love. The novel ends on an upbeat note, delivering a sense of relief that the ball lobbed back and forth between the two is at rest. Eric is left with a deep appreciation of his first great passion and recognition of the one with whom he will share a table for two.
A fine tale about the highlights and pitfalls of first love.Pub Date: March 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1972-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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