A slight sophomore slump in the series, but enough heart and soul to bring most of Mapson’s fans back for installment number...
Despite some lurid plot premises and extremely convenient coincidences, the feisty characters and rueful emotional wisdom of this sequel will win over all but the hardest-hearted reader.
It’s one year since Phoebe, Ness, Nance, and Beryl joined forces Bad Girl Creek (2001) to get over bad health and bad men by working and living on Phoebe’s California flower farm, dubbing themselves the Bad Girls in honor of the creek running through it. Hundreds of miles away in Nebraska, 29-year-old Mary (“Maddy”) Madigan quits her drunken boyfriend and the rodeo they sing in to head for Oklahoma City, where her twin sister was killed five years earlier in the bombing of the Murrah Building. There, she runs into Rick, the can’t-commit music journalist who drove Nance to the Bad Girls. Even before Maddy and Rick fall into bed together, we learn that (1) Phoebe’s beloved Juan was killed in a car crash on their wedding day and she’s pregnant with his baby, and (2) Nance is going to marry Phoebe’s brother James, even though she’s anorexic and not exactly over Rick. In a Santa Fe bar hosting a performance by her mysteriously wealthy boyfriend Earl (who might be the legendary studio guitarist Buckethead, always masked in public by a KFC bucket), Beryl befriends Maddy and disapproves of Rick. They arrive at Bad Girl Creek two days before James’s wedding, causing Nance to keel over, cut her head, and land in the hospital. Yes, it’s a lot to swallow, but undeniably fun to read; the story zips along, powered by the marvelously individual narrators’ voices, particularly those of Maddy and Rick, who are both smart enough to know how screwed up they are. The Bad Girls play mostly supporting roles here, but what hasn’t changed is the author’s hardheaded understanding that some actions cause permanent damage, softened by her cautious optimism that even damaged people can find new love and new purpose.
A slight sophomore slump in the series, but enough heart and soul to bring most of Mapson’s fans back for installment number three to see how she ties up all those loose ends.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2461-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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