TAKING FLIGHT

Name: TAKING FLIGHT
Author: Stephen Tritto
ISBN: 978-1482662467

by Stephen Tritto ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2013

A novel that artfully spans two cultures, from a talented new author ready to take wing.

bookshelf

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

GET IT

Tritto’s sparkling debut novel succeeds as a gripping tale of one man’s self-discovery.

Tritto, a veteran short story author, tells the story of Anthony Bartolo, a product manager for a high-tech firm. He and his wife, Bernadette, a buyer for an upscale department store, are DINKs—dual incomes, no kids—living well in the suburbs, as are the couples with whom they socialize. By most standards, Anthony should be content, but he still feels unfulfilled—a good thing, narratively speaking, since these characters are fairly unappealing early in the novel. Then life throws some changes at the Bartolos and their friends. Anthony is blindsided when he loses his job, which leaves him casting about for what he wants to do with his life. Such ruminations could come off as whiny, but in Tritto’s capable hands, Anthony blossoms. A member of their group dies while doing charitable work in El Salvador, and Anthony, the only one with time on his hands, volunteers to retrieve his remains. In fact, he selfishly does so without consulting Bernadette, further threatening their crumbling relationship. Anthony’s worldview changes once he lands in the Central American country, which is populated by believable characters, including his guide, Col. Juan Hernandez, a former rebel leader who serves as security for Anthony during his trip. While Anthony jumps through bureaucratic hoops in order to take his friend home, he learns to appreciate the ways of El Salvador while navigating its dangers and tragedies. Anthony arrives in El Salvador as a well-meaning but sometimes-ugly American, yet he comes back a changed man, bearing precious cargo: not only his friend’s body, but also a secret from his friend’s other life. Anthony doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he doesn’t want his old life. Tritto helps Anthony evolve from a self-absorbed yuppie to a man more empathetic to those around him, a man readers can root for even if he still doesn’t truly know himself.

A novel that artfully spans two cultures, from a talented new author ready to take wing.

Pub Date: April 3, 2013

ISBN: 978-1482662467

Page Count: 464

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.