Too long, too intricate, and finally too obvious: a nice plot that ends up tripping over itself.
First-novelist Herrick (stories: At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, 1992) offers a science tale about a genetically engineered baby.
Brooklyn housewife Pinky is happy with her bioengineer husband Arthur and son Teddy, seven, but she wants another child—yet can’t convince Arthur to have one. Arthur, who does DNA research, is feeling rather besieged by the maternal instinct just now: his lab assistant, Marina, has talked him into giving a sample of his semen so she can have a child of her own, and Arthur is afraid Pinky will find out. What he doesn’t know is that Marina has “boosted” his semen with DNA chromosomes in a genetic experiment of her own. Ken Fishhammer, head of the bioengineering department, knows what Marina has done and is interested in seeing the outcome—especially when the university expels him and shuts down his lab after discovering that he was performing unauthorized research. Ken goes to work for a private laboratory and waits for Marina’s child as the only means left to test his work now that his project has been cancelled. Marina gives birth to a healthy boy but dies a few months later in a road accident, and her sister Katya is left with the child. Ken immediately steps in and offers to adopt the boy, but his offers on the child’s behalf (a specially constructed nursery in the lab, along with a deaf-mute nanny named Maurice) are rejected when Katya informs him that “other relatives” have taken the baby. Indeed, Pinky wakes up that same day to discover a healthy, happy, well-fed baby boy on her doorstep. Happy ending? More like a bad start. Ken isn’t willing to let his superchild escape and sets about tracking him down. Meanwhile, can Arthur (who’s now trying to adopt the boy) keep his family together? It might help if he knew the child were really his.
Too long, too intricate, and finally too obvious: a nice plot that ends up tripping over itself.Pub Date: March 31, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03197-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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