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SMALL BLESSINGS

Name: SMALL BLESSINGS
Author: Martha Woodroof
ISBN: 978-1-250-04052-7

by Martha Woodroof ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2014

A pleasant read about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances and the optimism that guides them.

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In this debut novel, the arrival of a spunky new manager at the local bookstore heralds a sea change in the college and community it serves.

Tom Putnam’s life has been virtually unchanged since he completed graduate school. He teaches English at a picturesque small-town college in Virginia. He lives in faculty housing with his wife, Marjory, a meek, troubled woman, and her mother, Agnes, who helps with Marjory’s care. Tom is not necessarily happy, but he is dutiful, and he and Agnes make a good team. He enjoys his work and has a sort-of friend on the faculty, stuffed-shirt Russell Jacobs, and a sort-of nemesis, brash Iris Benson, but both are largely background to his daily, plodding existence. Late one summer, Rose Callahan appears on campus to invigorate programming at the bookstore. Simultaneously, immense changes descend on Tom’s life: Marjory dies in an automobile accident, and a mysterious boy arrives on a train claiming to be the product of Tom’s one, brief extramarital affair. Rose, though unconnected to these events, comes to the forefront of Tom’s life as they unfold. With her forthright self-confidence and ease around others, Tom is drawn to her magnetically, and the feeling appears mutual. Soon, the caregiving duo of Tom and Agnes expand their circle to include Rose and the boy, Henry. Rose’s signature qualities, however, also draw Tom’s colleagues—and their instabilities—out of the woodwork, complicating the surprising ease of this new family’s growth. With the sheer number of dramatic plot points, the novel should read like pulp, and there are quite a few loose ends to tie up in the conclusion, but Woodroof’s light hand and compassion for her characters make the story flow naturally. The question of what makes a family is gently asked and answered throughout.

A pleasant read about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances and the optimism that guides them.

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-250-04052-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

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.