Another for Civil War buffs or history junkies. Others can pass.
The Civil War, a budding romance, snippets of Walt Whitman—none of these does very much to elevate this flat first novel of two cousins during the War Between the States.
It’s 1859, and Isabel Lindsey, 12, worships her older cousin Laurence, so when he insists she help a runaway slave they stumble upon, she hesitantly agrees. Though it’s a free state, some Vermonters, including the prominent Lindsey family, return runaway slaves to their owners. The fate of the poor slave the two are unable to help spurs Laurence to join the Union Army a couple of years later to fight for justice. The hardships of war, the camaraderie of (and sometimes conflicts between) the soldiers, the change from Laurence the boy to Laurence the world-weary man in just a few short years—all these are well-detailed yet not especially original ways to approach this oft-written-about American tragedy. Though largely concerning itself with Laurence and his experiences on the battlefield, the story occasionally shifts back to Bel at home in Vermont, and the speedy romance that has developed between her and her French tutor, Louis. Inspired by Bel’s convictions, Canadian Louis decides also to fight for the North and soon finds himself face-to-face with Laurence, who, in his exhaustion, has decided that he’s in love with Bel, too. That, and a somewhat pointless subplot involving a romance between Bel’s mother and Laurence’s father (perhaps unrequited), gives respite from the war at the front. The graphic finale, when Laurence and Louis barely survive the devastating Battle of the Wilderness, has Bel in a Washington hospital nursing an unrecognizably deformed Laurence and stealing kisses with Louis. Solid language, likable characters, steady enough plot—and yet the story never seems to take off, stuck as it is in material that’s been picked over with a fine-toothed comb.
Another for Civil War buffs or history junkies. Others can pass.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28757-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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