A dark, deft first novel about the trauma and resilience of both people and the land they inhabit.
A young teen ensnared in a cult becomes obsessed with finding her exiled mother.
Peaches is a small town near Fresno, in California’s Central Valley. Once the raisin capital of the world, now Peaches is drought-ridden, with empty canals and residents in perpetual thirst. Large numbers of townspeople have turned to Pastor Vern, a Christ-like figure who promises that, if his congregants follow him and complete their “assignments,” the rains will fall on Peaches again. (In the meantime, the churchgoers get baptized in cola.) Fourteen-year-old Lacey May, who lives with her alcoholic mother, doesn’t know what her mother’s assignment is; she only knows that she disappears somewhere unknown during the day and can’t seem to stay out of trouble with Pastor Vern. When Lacey’s mother is banished from the congregation and leaves town, Lacey must go live with her eccentric grandmother Cherry, an exuberant follower of the Gifts of the Spirit church. After Lacey is finally given a horrific assignment of her own, she is determined to find out where her mother has gone and what she knew about Pastor Vern’s unsavory plans for the town of Peaches. Bieker has written a debut that joins Emma Cline’s The Girls and R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries in exploring the uneasy intersection of repressive religious belief and burgeoning sexuality, but Bieker’s exploration of the way that poverty and environmental ravishment also add to the subjugation of the female body adds more rich layers to this narrative. It’s a lot to juggle, but Lacey May is such a strong narrator, at once deeply insightful and painfully naïve, that readers will eagerly want to follow all the threads to the breathless conclusion.
A dark, deft first novel about the trauma and resilience of both people and the land they inhabit.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-48-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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