A compelling graphic novel documenting a lost musical history.
Cahill and Baumann dramatize the life of a Cambodian singer against the backdrop of war and revolution in this graphic novel.
In Battambang, Cambodia, in the year 1967, singer Ros Serey Sothea, known to her family as Little Cricket, has been making her name around town, performing at weddings and talent shows despite her periodic bouts of stage fright. Music is a fun distraction from her day job boiling and selling snails, not to mention the political violence that has gripped the country. When she’s offered the opportunity to sing on Cambodia’s National Radio, she goes against her mother’s wishes and runs off to the capital, Phnom Penh. Soon she has a top radio hit and is performing for the Cambodian royal family. Her rising star breeds resentment in some of the other radio performers, including crooner Sos Mat (whom she nevertheless agrees to marry). When the royal family is ousted in an American-backed coup, Ros finds herself forced to write patriotic songs for the new regime. The new political reality doesn’t prevent Ros’ star from rising even higher, though it does wreak havoc on her personal and romantic life. As disruptive as the new government is, however, it is nothing compared to the one waiting in the wings—the brutal communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge. Cahill and Baumann bring Ros’s story to life with subtlety and grace. The writing is economical but effective at capturing the characters’ various personalities. “I think big city living made little cricket soft,” Ros’s mischievous brother tells her when she returns briefly to work on the family farm. “I can just picture you sitting in a French cafe ordering expensive coffee and saying ‘ooh la la.’ ” Baumann’s art is particularly stunning, rendering the shiny studios of Phnom Penh and the green of the countryside in vivid color. Ros’ brilliant but short life makes for an excellent avenue to explore this tumultuous period of Cambodian history and demonstrates the ways that music can capture the spirit of a people—even after the musician is gone.
A compelling graphic novel documenting a lost musical history.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781643378732
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Life Drawn
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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