This novel about a chain of interlinked friends on the brink of their 30s has a few overly manufactured plot elements but...
This debut novel from a bestselling essayist follows a circle of friends on a quest to find a priceless necklace and regain an even rarer treasure: a genuine connection.
This trenchant first novel from the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008) and How Did You Get This Number (2010) is about a necklace; Guy de Maupassant’s classic short story, “The Necklace”; and an interconnected circle of friends from college who, like beads on a broken necklace, have dispersed and rolled off on different paths. Some of these young people have gotten lost—or lost some essential part of themselves—along the way as they hurtle toward their 30s, watching their 20s blur by and disappear in the rearview mirror. While the luckier (wealthier, more successful) of them marry and move toward parenthood, three of the pals—hapless, unemployed data-crunching Brooklynite Victor; charismatic yet not quite successful LA screenwriter Nathaniel; and clever, spritelike Kezia, whose job working for an offbeat jewelry designer in Manhattan is, she fears, hardening her soul—all single, are beginning to wonder if they're wasting their lives pursuing goals as false and worthless as a paste gemstone. Crosley’s smart, sardonic, sometimes-zany, yet also sensitive story is told from the alternating perspectives of these three linked characters, taking the readers along as they reunite first for a friend’s wedding in Miami and then again for a road trip in France, setting off from Paris in pursuit of, yes, a priceless necklace but also of things far more valuable: the truth about themselves and one another, a genuine sense of purpose (or, at least, an antidote to their approaching anhedonia), and, perhaps most precious of all, a connection to one another.
This novel about a chain of interlinked friends on the brink of their 30s has a few overly manufactured plot elements but overall is a real gem.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-12441-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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