In a haunting portrait of longing, Hunter forces the reader to relate to a wide array of human ugliness.
Two high school girls put on a tough act to hide deep-seated insecurities in this gripping character-driven novel.
Hunter (Don’t Kiss Me, 2013, etc.) opens in medias res with Baby Girl driving a stolen red Mazda. Perry, riding shotgun, looks at Baby Girl and thinks, “Fake-ass thug.” With this quick insight, it's clear that, despite sharing nights of “thugging,” their bond is very thin. Each girl masks a private pain. Baby Girl’s gun-carrying older brother, Charles, was in a motorcycle accident that left him with irreversible brain damage. She's shaved half her head and stolen cars in an attempt to fill his place. Perry, who lives in a trailer park with her stepfather and alcoholic mother, has relied on her looks to get what she wants since she was 14. The novel's power lies in its depth. The roving third-person narrator dips in and out of five main characters’ minds. In addition to Perry and Baby Girl, there's Perry’s mother, Myra; her stepfather, Jim; and Jamey, a threatening and mysterious figure who seems to be stalking both girls. The depiction of the working-class poor is nuanced and real. Myra is saved from becoming a flat depiction of an absentee mother when we see her internal struggle with alcoholism. Jim is similarly saved from becoming a stereotypical “good guy” when we follow him to his job as a prison guard and watch him beat prisoners for simply mentioning his family life. As the perspectives weave together and move forward, Hunter toys with the reader’s sympathies. Characters we might have written off or hated re-emerge in full and compelling form. Even Jamey, the villain, becomes somewhat sympathetic when we see what life looks like inside his home. As Baby Girl and Perry continue shoplifting and skipping school, unaware of the true danger that approaches them, the action accelerates. The novel moves toward a conclusion that is shocking, sad and inevitable.
In a haunting portrait of longing, Hunter forces the reader to relate to a wide array of human ugliness.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-53386-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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