While unapologetically gross, the book is ultimately motivational in its own peculiar way.
Donley’s (Farmer Tice #2, 2017, etc.) collection of illustrated stories chronicles the mishaps of an ill-fated farmer named Tice.
Farmer Tice can’t seem to do anything right. He tried to see the movie Snow White and the Seven Farmers only to find himself wedged between two awful theater patrons. During a stint in the Army, he was nearly court-martialed for wearing a colonel’s uniform. Then there is the fact that nearly everyone he encounters seems to want to get money out of him. Take for example when Tice was caught fishing without a license and received a $100 fine for the error. Sadly, for all of the abuse the Job-like farmer receives, he doesn’t get much in return. His obese wife, Honeybunch, despises him (“You should have known better, you idiot!” she says when he is fined for grilling hot dogs on the beach although she packed the hibachi), and it is many a night that Farmer Tice has to sleep in the barn (where he should feel himself fortunate if some animal does not eat an article of his clothing). All told, Tice is a dimmer Wile E. Coyote if there ever was one, falling off cliff after cliff only to appear again for more torment. The fun of the book comes in seeing how high the next cliff will be and when exactly old Tice will stop falling. Albeit all those falls are not for the squeamish. The stories make frequent use of bathroom humor (as with a New Year’s Eve misadventure: “the result of guzzling prune juice—the backdoor trots!”), and the accompanying illustrations only help to clarify where all those bodily fluids wind up. On the positive end, nothing seems to keep Farmer Tice down for long. Despite all the barf, fines, and his own intolerable marriage, he still has fields to plow and a barn roof under which he can rest his weary head. Regardless of one’s station in life, one can learn a lot from a farmer who won’t let his consistently poor luck keep him down.
While unapologetically gross, the book is ultimately motivational in its own peculiar way.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-3410-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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