Clever and exasperating by turns, a mishmash of poetry, The Princess Bride, and myths from old worlds and new.
Canadian poet Guriel returns to the whimsical world of Forgotten Work (2020) for an even more bonkers epic.
If Guriel’s fiction debut about a musical scavenger hunt was 1970s-era space rock, this book is full-on Lord of the Rings via Ralph Bakshi with a scattering of cyberpunk tropes to keep things spicy. Like its predecessor, it’s not easy to read unless you’re the sort who finds rhyming couplets roll off the tongue, but the author’s playful disposition and quixotic milieu remain infectious. The book alternates two storylines, juxtaposing a young scholar’s fascination with a famous work of YA fiction with the text of that novel, also composed entirely in rhyme and concerning itself with seafaring werewolves. When Kaye’s friend Cat drags her to a convention celebrating The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, she’s not terribly impressed, but something about the book’s depictions of pirates and monsters gets under her skin, as does the mystery of the book’s author, Mandy Fiction, who vanished into thin air in 2052. Guriel’s book desperately needs focus, but it has plenty of startling imagery to enliven the reader’s journey. There’s clever wordplay satirizing corporate culture (apparently ZuckTube and ZikZok remain inescapable in the future) but also dystopian vistas, like the crater where Kaye lives and where Montreal once stood. Meanwhile, the teenage lycanthropes onboard the Lucy Dread sail treacherous seas in search of a sea monster dubbed a “Moby.” Soon, Kaye is invited by her eccentric professor Emmett Lux to join him for a research assistantship in Japan, where her relationship to Fiction’s fiction becomes even more Byzantine. Those who can manage the linguistic gymnastics needed to navigate the journey—laden with pop-culture references and winking observations about the fickle nature of fan culture—will reap strange rewards.
Clever and exasperating by turns, a mishmash of poetry, The Princess Bride, and myths from old worlds and new.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965514
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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
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