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26A

Name: 26A
Author: Diana Evans
ISBN: 0-06-082091-8

by Diana Evans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2005

At once tender and funny: a keen study of home, homelessness and the limits of symbiosis.

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Mixed-race twins come of age in a London suburb.

Half-English, half-Nigerian, Georgia and Bessi Hunter were born 45 minutes apart; and little has separated them since. In the attic of their home on Waifer Lane, they share dreams, a private language of thought and feeling and a pet hamster named Ham. Below, in their creaky house, their British father drinks and hangs pictures of the Dorset countryside, while their Nigerian mother wards off evil with wooden masks. Nothing seems to be able to make these parents remember how to love each other. Still, for all its hybrid fissures, the family hangs together: In colorful bursts, Evans’s debut follows the twins through their early life in London, then to Nigeria and back again to London. The twins’ older sister Bel falls for boys while younger Kemy grows Rastafari curls and idolizes Michael Jackson. The twins, meanwhile, tend to the roses in the garden and learn how to make flapjacks in home economics. While in Nigeria, both do cartwheels and chatter with their darker-skinned ancestors. Through two very different homelands, and the strange years of their adolescence, the twins’ symbiotic relationship helps them navigate the odd “betweenness” of their lives. Yet as Georgia and Bessi grow, private tragedies threaten the bond they once had, until both are forced to cope with new and profound forms of isolation. As they struggle to find themselves, they are pulled apart by deep currents that will alter them forever.

At once tender and funny: a keen study of home, homelessness and the limits of symbiosis.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-082091-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A HOUSE FOR ALICE
by Diana Evans

- BOOK REVIEW
ORDINARY PEOPLE
by Diana Evans

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.