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WHEN WE GET THERE

Name: WHEN WE GET THERE
Author: Shauna Seliy
ISBN: 978-1-59691-350-9

by Shauna Seliy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007

Deeply felt and written with immaculate care to create a fictional world that feels truly lived in.

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This first novel lovingly parses a mid-1970s western Pennsylvania community of farmers and miners, largely of Eastern European descent, whose way of life is coming apart as the coal mines close.

Thirteen-year-old Lucas’s handsome and universally respected and loved father Jimmy died in a mining explosion years earlier. Now Lucas’s adored mother Mirjana has disappeared, leaving behind only a short note. Staying with his feisty grandmother, nicknamed Slats, Lucas grudgingly finds himself enfolded into his large extended family, centered on Great-grandfather, the family patriarch. Confused and lonely, Lucas wants only to find his mother, but he is not the only one desperate to find Mirjana. Her current boyfriend Zoli, whose love for Mirjana borders on obsession, tries to kidnap Lucas from an Eastern Orthodox Christmas Eve celebration at Great-grandfather’s farm and then burns down Great-grandfather’s sacred pear tree that he brought with him from Slovenia. As Lucas hunts for clues to his mother’s whereabouts, Zoli turns increasingly menacing in his frantic pursuit. The level of violence escalates. Zoli almost kills Jimmy’s best friend Marko when Marko takes the blame for burning down Zoli’s house, a fire he knows Lucas started. But despite arson and beatings, the novel’s primary mood is sorrow. Memories of life before Jimmy’s death offer a vivid counterpoint to the unhappy present, especially as Great-grandfather’s health fails and Lucas learns the sad truth that Mirjana is not in California as Slats has implied, but has committed herself into a local mental hospital. Seliy brings the dying working class town of Banning into sharp relief. She captures its bleak everyday rhythm punctuated by weddings, funerals and mining disasters, and she creates a population of characters, including Zoli—in a lesser novel he would be pure villain—heart-wrenching in their sense of loss and capacity for love.

Deeply felt and written with immaculate care to create a fictional world that feels truly lived in.

Pub Date: May 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-59691-350-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007

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.