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THE MAKING OF JUNE

Name: THE MAKING OF JUNE
Author: Annie Ward
ISBN: 0-399-14890-6

by Annie Ward ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2002

A world and time brought vividly to life, and romantic to boot. Ward does a masterful job of delineating political...

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A first novel, based on Ward’s experience living in the Balkans during the upheavals of the late 1990s, combines two love stories: an American falls in love with a Bulgarian woman, while his wife falls in love with Bulgaria itself.

June and Ethan Carver come from Los Angeles to Sofia so that Ethan can complete his doctoral thesis. Initially, 30-year-old June hates and resents the unsophisticated, uncomfortable world she’s landed in and sends smart-aleck e-mails to friends and family. But her secret guilt over a brief affair back in California pushes her to stay in Sofia for Ethan’s sake. Meanwhile, Ethan meets Nevena, a Bulgarian woman working as a maid for June’s American friend Roxanne. When June spills the beans about her indiscretion, Ethan’s sense of betrayal sends him into Nevena’s arms. Nevena, however, is not your standard issue “other woman.” A Muslim, she has survived rape and the murder of her parents’ by Bulgarian nationalists. Despite snags caused by cultural misunderstandings, Ethan and Nevena’s romance deepens. With her, Ethan becomes the loving, generous man he’s unable to be with June, who, with her boundless capacity for self-destructiveness, falls into an affair with a local mafioso named Chavdar. The e-mails to and from America offer up a counterpoint to the charged energy of the growing political and economic unrest that have swept up June and Ethan. June’s interest in gossip from home fades as she becomes involved in the struggles of the local Bulgarians she’s befriended, particularly her aging language tutor. While an enlightened June tries to extricate herself from the increasingly dangerous liaison with Chavdar, whose acts of kindness come with a high price, Nevena’s sense of responsibility to her younger sister draws her toward dangerous dealings with Chavdar’s henchmen.

A world and time brought vividly to life, and romantic to boot. Ward does a masterful job of delineating political complexities while creating characters painfully real in their imperfections and humanity.

Pub Date: May 13, 2002

ISBN: 0-399-14890-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002

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.