A smart, highly entertaining update on a classic story.
DeRoche reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in modern Los Angeles.
The story starts, like Twain’s, in St. Petersburg, Missouri. There, Huckleberry Finn is looking to get loose of his abusive father, Pap, who has a get-rich-quick scheme that involves moving to Los Angeles. Huck can’t get away before Pap bundles them both into their camper to head west. Soon, the youngster finds out that his father is involved in a drug deal, which goes sour. However, Huck and his new friend, Tom Sawyer, find a way for the LAPD to capture the drug kingpin; the boys collect a reward while Pap goes on the lam. A judge then puts Huck in the care of a lesbian couple, Miss Watson and Ms. Douglas, who try to “civilize” Huck, just as their namesakes did in the original novel. Huck also finds himself drawn to his new friend, Miguel, a stable hand and undocumented immigrant. Pap had always told Huck that so-called “Mexigrants” were ruining the country and that homosexuality was evil—but in Los Angeles, Huck sees the wrongness of these notions. Pap resurfaces to try to get some of Huck’s reward, and he injures Ms. Watson and Ms. Douglas in the process. Miguel defends Huck and fends off Pap, who appears to be dead. Because Miguel is undocumented, he can’t tell his side of the story to police. He and Huck wind up traversing LA’s man-made rivers, meeting helpful folks and rapscallions. Overall, this is a charming, politically minded tale. What DeRoche truly understands about the Huck Finn character is his outsider’s perspective. For example, the book addresses a range of explosive topics, such as religion, revolution, electoral politics, and even a bit of reality television, but because Huck is encountering all of these things for the first time, he has no preconceived notions about any of them. This allows the author to mine different situations for pointed humor without ever turning the narrative into an obvious polemic. Along the way, debut illustrator González’s occasional black-and-white, woodcut-style images are nice additions.
A smart, highly entertaining update on a classic story.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992776-7-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Redtail Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
