Richly textured and artfully told through the varied perspectives of believable characters.
Poet and novelist Divakaruni (The Conch Bearer, 2003, etc.) stirs up a tasty curry that’s half-mystery, half-fantasy in a clever tale of a young woman trying to sort out the mystery of her mother’s death—and life.
Having a clairvoyant mother can be a pain, but not always. Berkeley artist Rakhi Gupta is going through all the usual thirtysomething traumas of family and career—her first gallery exhibition is due to open soon, her coffeehouse is being undersold by a Starbucks-like competitor, her loathsome ex-husband is constantly dropping in to see their daughter—and she’s getting desperate enough to do the worst thing a grown girl can do: turn to her mother for help. Mrs. Gupta is an India-born “dream reader” who has developed a select following in California for her ability to interpret her clients’ nocturnal fantasies (“A dream of milk means you are about to fall ill”). Rakhi wants to sound her out on a few worries of her own, but before she has the chance her mother is killed in a car accident. Rakhi’s father, who survives the crash, tells her that just before the accident her mother seemed to be pursuing someone in a mysterious black car. Creepy enough—and now Rakhi’s six-year-old daughter Jona is becoming more and more insistent that her imaginary friend Elaina isn’t imaginary at all. A childhood fantasy—or a more complicated grown-up one? Somehow, Rakhi feels that the answers lie in her mother’s dream notebooks, which her father has agreed to translate for her. As a record of the hidden world of her clients and herself, Mrs. Gupta’s notebooks unlocked the door to many mysteries during her lifetime. Perhaps they’ll do so once more now that she is dead.
Richly textured and artfully told through the varied perspectives of believable characters.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50682-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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