Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive—Reed has made a marvelous debut.
An adolescent orphan writes a glossarylike “key” to his life in Reed’s astute, experimental, and very affecting debut.
William Tyce’s key begins with ABSENCE and proceeds in roughly alphabetical order through such terms as BABY MEMORIES, BOATING IN BASEMENTS, COURAGE, FAULTY WISHING, GYPSIES, MORTAL BETRAYAL, and PHILOSOPHY OF NIHILISM. Abandoned by his parents, living in his uncle’s mansion in a city in the Midwest, William’s life, as he projects it onto these pages, is an eccentrically human alchemy of loneliness, boredom, jealousy, nostalgia, brutality, and folk mythologies; and his insights range from beautifully perceptive (“the brain lives on patterns the way a blade of grass lives on sunlight”) to darkly humorous (“put a nail through a lemon, whip it out the window of a treehouse, bean a kid with it—that kid will probably move on”). We learn that BETTA FISH “can cure you of nightmares if you hold them in your mouth for ten seconds each night before you go to sleep,” and that a “Daddy” is “a false authority,” and if one tries to climb into your treehouse, you will have to “beat on his fingers with a hammer.” Grim? Indeed. There is much darkness in poor William’s ledger, especially as—moving down the alphabet—his life veers toward narrative, forsaking the static sadness of his youth. First, William’s uncle—“the authority on high-stakes gambling”—is arrested for arson and insurance fraud, leaving him without a caregiver (see LIVING IN BUNKHOUSES FOR GIRLS AND BOYS WHO ARE WARDS OF THE STATE). Then he runs away, living under a bridge and taking up drinking. He feels increasingly like “the world [is] a chaotic soup in which [he’s] slowly being boiled.” To do something, he eventually builds a raft and casts off downriver (see NEBULOUS PLANS). The life that follows necessitate glossary entries like MYSTICAL VISION, NEAR DEATH, OCCUPANTS OF HOLDING AREAS IN RURAL JAILS, PURPOSE, REVELATION, TEMPTATION, and more—all the way to YONDER, THE WILD BLUE.
Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive—Reed has made a marvelous debut.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947793-04-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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