Half-baked Orwell.
A ramshackle circus troupe attempts to rescue its imprisoned ringleader in this political farce/allegory.
Horowitz’s prior fictional works have been collaborations, including the novel The New World (2015) with Chris Adrian and the ambitious book app The Silent History (2014) with Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett. An extra set of hands might have improved this thin and only intermittently funny tale of wrongful arrest and totalitarian regimes. As the story opens in an imaginary country, circus leader Zloty Kornblatt has been arrested by a strike team and accused of illegal performances that stoked “mockery, destabilization, and anarchy.” While he stews in a “Confinement Needle” and awaits a kangaroo court’s verdict in a neighboring and more conservative province, circus member Flora helps plot a rescue, but her cohorts are unpromising saviors: husband-and-wife performers are at each other’s throats, and the strongman only wants to deliver imitation feats of strength according to “Continental mime theory.” The novel alternates between Flora’s voice—earnest, adventure-seeking—and that of a lackey for the regime holding Zloty—bureaucratic, propagandistic—which helps underscore Horowitz’s point about the virtues of independence, however scruffily acquired. But tonally, the novel never successfully settles into the satiric tone it aspires to, leaning heavily on quirky coinages (“smokepoot,” “tedfruit,” “Harmimal,” and the “Pickle Index” itself, a kind of collection of good-hearted folklore), while the plot turns as the circus infiltrates the needle are threadbare disguises, suddenly handy escape hatches, etc. It gives nothing away to say that the novel stands for the power of a small committed team to overwhelm the bad guys and challenge the way rebels are persecuted for public entertainment. But its plot and prose are too limp to sell the point. “Nonsense had gotten us this far,” Flora enthuses, as their plot comes together. But nonsense only goes so far.
Half-baked Orwell.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-53581-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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