An orphan’s tale delivers a delightful combination of tones and is bound to leave readers both smiling and thoughtful.
A novel examines the fascination, pity, and prejudice in an unusual child’s life as well as the challenges of dreaming outside the mold.
Hug Chickenpenny is a boy beset by misfortune and uncertainty. Born with a strange appearance—white hair, a stump of a left arm, a red eye, and a lumpy head—and orphaned from birth, he would seem to be in for a hard life. Although many at the orphanage look at him with sorrow or scorn, Hug nonetheless approaches the world with curiosity and optimism, looking past the petty slings and arrows of the harsher people around him and dreaming of exploration and adventure through rockets. But while some figures are sympathetic to Hug, like George Dodgett, a young employee at the orphanage, and a woman named Abigail Westinghouse, there are plenty of challenges to Hug’s positivity. These road blocks include people like Jennifer Kimberly, a cruel receptionist—and later, administrator—of the orphanage, and Dr. Hannersby, a scientist who studies “anomalies” like Hug and wishes to adopt him more as a pet and object of curiosity than a son. What follows is a complex, Dickensian tale of ambiguity and abnormality but, above all, hope. Zahler’s (A Congregation of Jackals, 2017, etc.) prose is solid, and the dialogue in particular shines, feeling natural without betraying the gothic style of the story. The characters are sometimes broad and archetypal, but that works in this sort of tale. They all have a certain edge, as even those with earnest affection for Hug can’t help but find some of his singular characteristics off-putting: “Something clicked and clacked behind the brunette, who then spun around to see what was happening. Hug was looking over his own back. His head was turned all the way around. Abigail shuddered.” Nevertheless, the narrative has a nonchalant tone that keeps the events from feeling excessively tragic even while they’re not overly sanitized. On the same note, the novel thankfully avoids depicting Hug as magical, presenting him as precocious without ascribing mysticism to disability. These are difficult balances to strike, and the book should be lauded for accomplishing that alone, even before getting to the charm and optimism that infuse the dark story.
An orphan’s tale delivers a delightful combination of tones and is bound to leave readers both smiling and thoughtful.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946487-00-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Cinestate
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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