A light, enjoyable horror story, with just the right amount of creepiness for younger readers.
In this middle-grade novel, a teenage girl may have to rescue her little brother when his Halloween mask takes on a life of its own.
Now that she’s a teen, Laura is forgoing trick-or-treating in favor of this year’s Halloween party with classmates. But Mom insists she take her 7-year-old brother, Trevor, trick-or-treating, as he’s still too young to go alone. The two decide to get masks at a peculiar local shop, which recently opened at the old mall that other stores have abandoned. Doctor Blaack’s Mask Shop is jampacked with masks, and by the time Laura encounters the owner, Trevor has wandered off. She and Blaack finally discover the terrified boy donning a mouse mask that refuses to come off. Though they can’t remove the mask, Blaack assures them it will fall off precisely at midnight tomorrow—Halloween. Luckily, the next day at school is a costume day, so Trevor doesn’t stand out. But the mask not only seems to be growing, it’s also gradually taking over Trevor, talking when it wants and even directing him where it wants to go. And as it turns out, if Trevor isn’t in a specified place by midnight, the mask will stay on his face permanently. Rasnic Tem’s (Ubo, 2017, etc.) horror tale, with shades of R.L. Stine’s The Haunted Mask, is an equal blend of fun and spine-tingling episodes. Blaack, for one, is eccentric but not outright malevolent. He’s also discernible, as he tends to bray his vowels (“That’s quite all ri-ight, my dear”). Much of the humor is understated and doesn’t derail the plot. The school’s costume parade, for example, is amusing but unquestionably chaotic: “Vampires and cowboys and aliens and kitty cats stood around talking and laughing and being just generally loud and way too annoying.” In the same vein, the mask, or “mouse head,” as the narrative eventually dubs it, becomes the book’s tangible villain. Certain traits, like an impossibly long tongue, leave a lasting and unsettling impression.
A light, enjoyable horror story, with just the right amount of creepiness for younger readers.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997736-0-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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