Lyrical, unexpected, and curiously affecting…a story that lodges uneasily in the heart and mind.
They, robots.
This novel's cast of troubled characters may consist largely of robots, but Winter’s (The Twenty-Year Death, 2012, etc.) melancholy family history owes more to the penetrating psychodynamics of Chekhov and Strindberg than to Isaac Asimov’s fantastic tales of artificial men. In sci-fi terms, Winter’s story recalls Ray Bradbury’s thoughtful, emotionally centered work, which was never overly concerned with the “science” half of the equation. In fact, Bradbury’s classic story “I Sing the Body Electric,” which explores the relationship between a robotic grandmother and her charges, strongly parallels Winter's setup: an isolated family of self-aware machines tends to an ailing human in a hazily described, far-flung, post-disaster future in which robots have seemingly become the dominant social force—albeit one with an uneasy relationship to its dwindling population of creators. We meet Barren Cove’s robot masters—fretful, yearning Mary; resentful, bullying Kent; and the monstrous, nihilistic Clark—through their interactions with Mr. Sapien, a new tenant, an older model machine looking for a respite from the rigors of the city. Sapien’s Nick Carraway–esque observations of the family provide an added layer of literary playfulness, but the book’s considerable power derives from its cockeyed yet unflinching confrontations with the power dynamics inherent in emotional bonds, whether between humans, smart machines, or a mixture of the two. Winter’s deft control of voice and canny vagueness about the nuts-and-bolts details of his world (a punk-rock robot bicycle/centaur girl typifies his whimsical take on sci-fi tropes) alternately draws in and unsettles the reader, effectively conveying the novel’s take on the necessity and agony of love and family—it weaves a uniquely dreamy spell, and a lingering one.
Lyrical, unexpected, and curiously affecting…a story that lodges uneasily in the heart and mind.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9785-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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