PERENNIALS

Name: PERENNIALS
Author: Mandy Berman
ISBN: 978-0-399-58931-7

by Mandy Berman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017

Berman’s debut recalls the beloved teen and adult novels of Judy Blume, both in topic and prose style: simple, powerful,...

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Stormy emotional weather and unforeseen events rock a summer camp in the Berkshires.

In a pair of chapters set in 2000 that form a prelude to this novel, we meet Rachel and Fiona at 13. Rachel is the daughter of a struggling single mom, born as the result of her mother’s longtime affair with a married man; summers at Camp Marigold are one of the few benefits her largely absent father offers to his secret second family. Fiona, from a much wealthier background (her parents met at Marigold when they were 9), has been Rachel’s best friend since she started there. The rest of the book takes place in 2006, and its 12 chapters rotate among these characters and other counselors and campers. First up is Fiona’s younger sister, Helen, who makes and loses a good friend in the latter part of seventh grade. Fortunately, she has camp to look forward to. Fiona, now at college in Connecticut and miserable about gaining the freshman 15, and Rachel, who goes to the University of Michigan and looks better than ever, are both back as counselors. Yonatan from Israel and Chad from the U.K. are among those who go to a Super-8 motel to party with them on their day off. Sheera, one of the only nonwhite campers, is at camp on scholarship and will never quite blend in…and then a shocking accident causes her to go home before summer’s end. The fallout from that event casts a shadow over the rest of the summer, deeply affecting British counselors Mo and Nell as well as Rachel and Fiona. Meanwhile, the camp director, Jack, divorced and lonely, will find that partying with the counselors isn’t such a great idea. Despite the escalating problems, neither the characters nor the reader will be prepared for what happens on the last day of the season.

Berman’s debut recalls the beloved teen and adult novels of Judy Blume, both in topic and prose style: simple, powerful, unafraid to confront serious issues.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-58931-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

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.