Berg fails to play to her strengths here.
A motivational speaker struggles to follow her own advice after a close friend dies.
Cecilia, successful self-help author and woman of a certain age—which she declines, on principle, to disclose—travels the nation inspiring others to be their best selves. However, since her best friend Penny died after a short illness, Cecilia herself is now adrift. Penny, her next-door neighbor in Minneapolis, had tried to persuade Cecilia to take a vacation and go globe-trotting with her. But Cecilia procrastinated, and now it is too late. Consulting a variety of fortunetelling devices, she sells her home—she has never married—and moves in with three other women, who are also at loose ends. The witty repartee among the four and their interactions with their pet, an aging yellow lab named Riley, are the most enjoyable aspects of this otherwise predictable pastiche of time-worn truisms on loss and aging. The four (and Riley) soon leave domestic routine to traverse the heartland in search of lost opportunities. Cecilia intends to reconnect with globe-trotting heartthrob Dennis, with whom she lost touch after college. Her traveling companions, advice columnist Renie, family physician Lise and chef Joni, are seeking, respectively, a lost daughter, an ex-husband and culinary inspiration. (Riley is just hoping for lots of road-food leftovers.) The bromidic plot leaves no doubt as to the outcome for all four. Berg marshals sentimental subplots in support of her inspirational thesis: The wry voice of the departed Penny reminds Cecilia that time’s winged chariot is hovering just overhead, the fiancee of a dying man in a hospice where Cecilia volunteers (that was Penny’s deathbed wish) offers him a last hope, and Cecilia’s dotty mother, an assisted living resident, is bent on getting married. However, the characterization, particularly of Cecilia, is too sketchy: A deeper, more fully articulated back story might have lent needed depth to our understanding of how Cecilia arrived at this juncture in her life.
Berg fails to play to her strengths here.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9314-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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