The clearly talented Tinti isn’t afraid to take risks, but sometimes she pushes her artfulness a bit too self-consciously.
As the title suggests, animals are the connecting motif among the 11 stories here, though newcomer Tinti’s real concern lies with damaged human beings.
In the title piece, an elephant keeper tempts fate by placing his head under the foot of his elephant—because of his own experience as victim and victimizer. The dog that appears in “Home Sweet Home,” sniffing around a dead body, belongs to a murderess who not only kills her husband’s mistress but also gets custody of her stepson, who has been unloved by his father. The pain of an absent or abusive father is frequently the underlying theme. In “Talk Turkey,” the most involving story here, three unhappy preteen boys run away from home. After an accident on the road, the two with fathers, however imperfect, are rescued by said fathers and pick up their lives; the youngster being raised by his single mother is left behind, never heard from again. The zoo diorama restorer who feels stalked by a stuffed bear in “Preservation” is coming to grips with the impending death of her father, a famous artist but negligent parent. The same bear appears in “Hit Man of the Year,” where it becomes a weapon used by a mob killer whose character is defined by his fatherless status and resulting lack of love. Tinti’s animals are seldom more that props or metaphors for what’s going on within her human characters; an exception is “Reasonable Terms,” in which zoo animals go on strike. The two most brutal tales, “Slim’s Last Ride” and “Bloodworks,” involve children whose attacks on animals are particularly vicious. “Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus” comes as a refreshing finale: the heroine, abandoned by her father but followed by his hired detectives, escapes into the African jungle, becomes an explorer of mythic proportions, and has a monkey named after her.
The clearly talented Tinti isn’t afraid to take risks, but sometimes she pushes her artfulness a bit too self-consciously.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33743-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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