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THE LUCKY ONES

Name: THE LUCKY ONES
Author: Julianne Pachico
ISBN: 978-0-399-58865-5

by Julianne Pachico ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2017

Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.

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Set during the bloody height of the Colombian conflict and spanning more than two decades, Pachico’s unforgettable whirlwind of a debut centers around the intersecting lives of a group of wealthy schoolgirls as well as the parents, teachers, and housekeepers who move in their orbit.

It’s 2003, and Stephanie Lansky’s parents have taken off for the holiday weekend to attend a lavish party in the mountains of Cali, leaving 17-year-old Stephanie—she herself has declined the invitation—under the care of their beloved housekeeper. But one day in, and Stephanie finds the housekeeper gone, the phone lines dead, and a man with a thickly scarred face buzzing ceaselessly at the door. Now it’s 2008, and Stephanie’s former eighth-grade teacher, held captive in the Colombian jungle, spends his days teaching the finer points of Hamlet to a class of leaves and sticks, parasites burrowing into his arms. In Cali, a class of third graders dutifully writes condolence cards to the parents of a classmate, blown up over the mountains. In New York City, a Colombian expat has reinvented herself as an American fashion student, dealing drugs to Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side college boys, each tiny bag of powder carrying a remnant of the past she can’t seem to escape. A little girl grows up with a pet lion in a house so opulent there’s an indoor fishpond; a young man writes articles about the links between the government and the death squadrons and has his fingers axed off by masked men with machetes. Taken alone—and some have been published as such—the chapters work as complete short stories, full worlds as vibrant and jarring as fever dreams. But together, they form something much larger, revealing a complicated and morally ambiguous web of interconnecting lives.

Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.

Pub Date: March 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-58865-5

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Julianne Pachico

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.