An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut.
Ivan Isaenko was born 18 months after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded near Pripyat, Ukraine, in 1986, and like many newborns from that region, he came into the world with numerous health problems and physical abnormalities.
In Ivan’s case, he’s missing legs and has just one three-fingered hand. But his brain works perfectly, and his sharp mind brings him to places dark, brooding, and inventive. The only home he’s ever known is the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus, and he detests the other patients, most of whom lack the ability to communicate with the intellectual rigor he craves. On top of this, Ivan has never met his parents and has never had a visitor. He has no friends, save for elderly Nurse Natalya, who not only treats him as a worthy conversationalist, but brings him books, puzzles, and games to keep him occupied. It’s not much, but it helps. Then, when he's 17, a new patient enters the mix. Orphaned Polina is everything Ivan is not—beautiful, able-bodied, lively, and full of teenage curiosity and sass. She’s also suffering from leukemia. As she and Ivan bond, their deep conversations and passionate exchanges rip the boy from his solitude, and, for the first time in his life, he finds camaraderie and connection with a peer. Not surprisingly, he falls in love with Polina, and the pair’s unfolding relationship is both tender and tragic. At the same time, their interactions are seasoned with humor, wit, and astute observation, and the hospital itself is as full a character as Ivan and Polina. What’s more, despite the presence of a corrupt health care bureaucracy, the story highlights the ways random acts of kindness can illuminate individual lives and make the seemingly unbearable tolerable, if not wholly acceptable.
An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08186-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
PROFILES
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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