A fast-paced historical novel that is both scary and witty, a wonderful combination.
In this prequel, readers discover where a feisty, chain-smoking, elderly flapper got her start—in Chicago in the Roaring ’20s with all of its frenetic craziness.
Seventeen-year-old Kathleen McPherson comes from a staid, upper-middle-class family in Minneapolis, but she is a rebel at heart. When a young classmate is murdered in the park right across from her house one night in 1923, she begins to sense danger. She decides she will absolutely not attend the women’s college that her family has picked out for her. A talented dancer, she and her gifted singer pal, Sophie Dagget, run off to Chicago. Amazingly, they both find work, but that just pulls them deeper into danger. Madcap characters proliferate. Some are good and protective, but others are as dangerous as rattlesnakes. In fact, people from Kathleen’s past in Minneapolis are more treacherous than the notorious gangsters in Chicago. Did her almost lover Chester Davidson fake his death, and is he now trying to kill her? What about wacky Ivy Schrader? Is Mrs. Vivian Davidson to be trusted? And who is this rather creepy Pritchard fellow who nonetheless seems to be a kind of guardian angel? The action never stops, and the girls—the annoying Dolly, a former classmate, also shows up—get into one scrape after another. Kathleen falls for a married man who is not really the cad that he seems. The imposter is finally revealed, and readers can have their choice of stalkers, depending on the quarry. Dietz (The Flapper, the Scientist, and the Saboteur, 2016), whose preceding novel featured Aunt Kathleen McPherson as an aging flapper and spirited amateur detective, has a wonderful time with all of it. The chapters are quite short, with each one featuring an epigraph and an appropriate cliffhanger or semicliffhanger. The author’s prose deftly captures her protagonist’s gutsiness and insouciance. Here Kathleen steals a gangster’s car left idling: “She floor boarded it down the street, howling in delight, taking the corner on two wheels.…Her face hurt from grinning.” It is hard to believe that the teenage flapper could be so savvy, so smart, such a survivor, but Dietz makes readers believe as the pages turn. The author is also a master of suspense. Not until the final pages is the stalker (or stalkers) revealed.
A fast-paced historical novel that is both scary and witty, a wonderful combination.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945212-65-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Quill Mark Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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