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RISE

Name: RISE
Author: Karen Campbell
ISBN: 978-1-63286-010-1

by Karen Campbell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 2015

An engaging writer introduces herself with this fresh, intelligent entertainment, full of satisfying moving parts.

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A young woman on the run from a vicious pursuer, a troubled marriage, a man tormented by a sneering ghost, and the fight to save a sacred landscape from development are the ingredients in a Scottish author's impressive U.S. debut.

Written in striking, often imaginative prose yet paced as immediately as a thriller, Campbell's novel hits the ground running as Justine Strang flees Glasgow on a bus to anywhere, with a stash of stolen money stuffed in her clothes. Desperate to escape from Charlie Boy, whose terrifying marks can be seen on her young flesh, Justine abruptly alights at Kilmacarra, a village in an ancient glen filled with standing stones. Local councilor Michael Anderson's political career hangs on his ability to push through the installation of a wind farm here, while his wife, Hannah, is part of the campaign to stop it. Wracked by Hannah's earlier betrayal of their marriage, Michael believes himself hounded by an apparition that mocks all he holds dear. But a sudden meeting with Justine clears his mind, and soon, she's hired as the Andersons’ nanny. Meanwhile, politicians are busy behind the scenes, archaeologists are excavating the stones, and Charlie Boy could show up at any time. Campbell’s deft handling of this busy scenario is marked by wit and a strong commitment to the Scottishness of her material, reflected in the language ("trauchle," "crannogs," "smirred," and so on) and her obvious love for Kilmacarra's history and landscape. There are soft spots, including a caricatured Spanish businessman and a convenient love interest, but little hinders the gathering force of the storytelling, with its ground-shifting dash to the finish line.

An engaging writer introduces herself with this fresh, intelligent entertainment, full of satisfying moving parts.

Pub Date: June 9, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63286-010-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.