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BRASS ANKLE BLUES

Name: BRASS ANKLE BLUES
Author: Rachel M. Harper
ISBN: 0-7432-7680-9

by Rachel M. Harper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2006

Uninspired.

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Plodding coming-of-age debut starring 15-year-old Nellie Kincaid, who has just learned that her parents, Malcolm and Virginia, are separating.

The Kincaids normally spend their summers at the family compound in rural Minnesota, but this year things are different. And it’s not just the impending separation; for the first time, Nellie’s two older brothers and her mother won’t be spending the season at the lake. This summer finds Nellie traveling with her father (an English professor) and her estranged cousin, Jess, toward the cottage. The trip has barely begun, however, when the family Volvo bursts into flames. Nellie and Jess opt to take Greyhound the rest of the way, but at a rest stop, they miss the bus’s departure and are forced to hitchhike. The girls have a few close encounters with potential perverts, but finally hitch a ride with handsome 19-year-old Dallas. Smitten with Nellie, Dallas takes a summer construction job with a local contractor; over the coming weeks, Nellie realizes she’s attracted to both Dallas and her summer neighbor, Luke. As a young woman of mixed race, Nellie has always felt a bit of an outsider—something that Luke can’t really understand, but Dallas, who is Sioux, can. As the summer progresses, we learn slightly more about the rift between Nellie’s parents and the reason for their separation (Virginia’s multiple affairs), and Nellie finds out more about her mother’s adolescence—knowledge that brings her misery, not peace. Harper’s prose can be clunky: “ ‘Confront’ is so similar to ‘comfort.’ This is what runs through my head when I go in search of my mother,” and her plotting is a bit heavy-handed, with fire both opening and closing the story.

Uninspired.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006

ISBN: 0-7432-7680-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OTHER MOTHER
by Rachel M. Harper

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS SIDE OF PROVIDENCE
by Rachel M. Harper

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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.