The author thankfully avoids a pat ending, adding a dash of hope to the story's sense of humor–despite a frustrating lack of...
Sharp and genuinely funny, this YA novel certainly "isn't the love story it's supposed to be."
Hiding out in a California hotel room 3,000 miles from his home in New Jersey, 17-year-old narrator Jim sets out to write the real story of what happened, as opposed to the one that's plastered across newspapers and splashed all over TV. It all started when Jim's mother ran away from home, leaving Jim upset, confused and flustered. At the same time, Jim realizes he's in love with his best friend and celebrity wannabe Zanny. He e-mails Zanny anonymously, and she eventually tells him that she knows he's the sender but that she deletes each one after reading it. But (uh-oh, Jim), she printed them first. Horrified that he'll be found out by others and used by Zanny as the attention-getter she's sought her entire life, Jim drunkenly invades her house, finds the printed emails, and, as Zanny's parents call the police, escapes out the window and into a tree. The police arrive and, stuck in the tree, Jim furiously shoves the e-mails down his throat. A passerby spies him, though, and snaps a photo of him as he's putting a paper with the huge-font word LOVE visible on it. Jim, to his dismay, becomes the subject of a giant human-interest story that the public eats up. Zanny finally has her 15 minutes and, manipulated by her, Jim suddenly finds himself on a national media tour. Liquor, sex, and betrayals of and by various friends and relatives are excised from Zanny's saccharine (and inaccurate) bestseller. Now, back in the California hotel room, having escaped the spotlight, Jim puts on paper the real story. Is his book called Idiot!? Perhaps . . .
The author thankfully avoids a pat ending, adding a dash of hope to the story's sense of humor–despite a frustrating lack of communication between just about everyone.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-9746481-1-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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