A delightful and humorous wish-fulfillment tale about interspecies bonding, engaging until the very end.
A debut novel follows an orphan living in a Bahamas resort who aids a baby dolphin.
Toby Matthias was orphaned at age 11, having lost his parents in a 1954 plane crash. Now he resides with his grandparents Vernon, aka Pop, and Irene, helping them run their Bahamian Out Island resort on the fictitious Piper Cay and commuting to school on the island of Nassau. He spends his free time learning how to sail, fish, and run his grandfather’s small power launch. What Toby lacks, living on an isolated island, is a close friend. That’s about to change. It is March 1957, and a baby bottlenose dolphin is jumping and emitting frantic clicks and cries at the end of the island’s garbage pier. Toby grabs his knife and swims over to investigate the commotion. The calf’s mother is entangled in fishing nets and unable to surface for air. Toby cuts the nets and frees the mother, earning the gratitude, and gradually the love, of the calf he names Phinney. In a fanciful idyll, Schmidt traces their friendship over the course of 12 years, as boy and dolphin play together and then move into adulthood, separating and reconnecting periodically. Readers follow Phinney as she travels with her pod and Toby when he attends school on the mainland, joins the Navy, and becomes an aircraft carrier pilot in Vietnam. Schmidt employs a split point of view approach, alternating between Toby’s perspective and Phinney’s, resulting in two well-developed characters. The book is filled with charming vignettes of their interactions, as when Phinney worries because Toby has switched from free diving to using scuba equipment: she knows the human cannot possibly stay underwater long. The author’s own passion for the sea and extensive sailing experience add a knowledgeable extra dimension that brings readers right into the enticing water. Despite Schmidt’s claim that he possesses no “special” knowledge of dolphins, his detailed descriptions of their physiology and cooperative social behavior remain informative and compelling. This joyful, imaginative fantasy feels so real that readers should willingly suspend their disbelief for the sheer pleasure of the ride.
A delightful and humorous wish-fulfillment tale about interspecies bonding, engaging until the very end.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9975010-1-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Landslide Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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