A brilliant portrayal of a girl who’s quite aware of what she’s going through.
A troubled adolescent girl dreams of setting fire to the world.
It starts with a stabbing and ends with a conflagration, and, in between, the novel never once telegraphs where it’s going. Serial surrealist Ball (A Cure for Suicide, 2015, etc.) has been justly accused of a variety of experimental ploys, but you can’t deny that when he delivers, it’s never quite what you expected. In this stark epistolary novel, the author fully occupies the inner life of a teenage girl, Lucia Stanton, who is writing down her experiences. When we meet her, she’s in the principal’s office for stabbing a boy who touched her most treasured possession, her dead father’s Zippo lighter. “So, I said, many times I said it, don’t touch this lighter or I will kill you,” she writes. “I think because I am a girl people thought I didn’t mean it.” Lucia lives with her kindly but destitute aunt in a converted garage with an overgrown garden. She makes predictions—not telling the future, she stresses—and writes them down in The Book of How Things Will Go. She’s not as profane as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but they share a certain aimlessness and cynicism about adults that rings true. Over the course of the novel, Lucia visits her ailing mother, gets high, flunks out of school, and ultimately falls in with some disillusioned young people in an Arson Club that dares her to start a fire. She also pens a brilliant pamphlet of the same title that’s nested within the pages of her scribblings. “It takes you some years to become the person who can burn a building, so be it,” she writes. “Carry your matches in your pocket, look at the faces of those who surround you in the crowd. Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?”
A brilliant portrayal of a girl who’s quite aware of what she’s going through.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87057-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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
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