A sure bet.
A delightful fourth and final book about the rich, quirky life of 21-year-old college student Hallie Palmer.
When the story opens, Hallie is days away from donning graduation cap and gown to begin her post-college life when she discovers a clerical error has left her one social-sciences class short. Minutes later, she bumps into Josh, an old crush of hers who tells her she can get the course credit if she signs up with a sociology team (of which Josh is a part) to travel the world, dropping wallets containing $20 each, as part of a professor's doctoral study on humanity's global honesty. But if Hallie embarks on this globe-trotting mission, it will throw a jumbo-sized wrench into her plans to move in with her longtime boyfriend Craig and start work at her new job. However, for this small-town girl, the opportunity is too irresistible to refuse and just before she departs, a stung Craig bestows a free-spirit status on them both. While her journey is fraught with food poisoning, an earthquake and various assorted comical conundrums, Hallie must also try to remain in her professor's good graces as well as withstand life with her roommate Mandy, a Mennonite who suddenly morphs into a henna-tattooed siren on the second day of the journey. Wiser for her tribulations, Hallie returns home to her family with eight siblings, her hysterically funny gay friend, Bernard and his perpetually politically correct mother, Olivia, and Craig. What follows is a marvelous ending with a funny domino-like sequence of surprises for Hallie and others. Though the book can be found on young-adult shelves, the story is more than sufficiently sophisticated to grab adults as well. Literary and cultural references add a wonderful depth to the anecdotes and metaphors. The book’s laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will find themselves rereading lines just for the sheer joy of it. They may also find that going back to the preceding three books will prove to be irresistible.
A sure bet.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4401-6962-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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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