An ingenious dramatization of the turbulent thoughts of a four-year-old boy makes something special of this otherwise somewhat contrived tale of the consequences of an interracial love affair—the fifth novel from the ambitious Scott (The Manikin, 1996, etc.). Young “Bo” is saved by his seat belt in the automobile accident that kills his mother Jenny Templin and sends him to live with his black grandparents, the Gilberts, whose youngest son Kamon, a high school student and Jenny’s lover, had also been killed, by robbers fleeing the scene of their crime, before their later son’s birth. We learn all this and more in fragments, as Scott juxtaposes scenes observed and only partially understood by Bo with extended passages of omniscient narration that move forward and backward in time, tracing Jenny’s estrangement from her own mother, Marge, and the latter’s stiff-necked, religious second husband Eddie Gantz; Kamon’s growing devotion to Jenny and hopeful plans for their future—then, after both are gone and Marge understands the extent of her loss, the custody struggle that takes Bo away from the indulgent Erna and Sam Gilbert and into the orbit of the demanding Eddie Gantz, whose disciplinarian fury erupts during one unhappy Thanksgiving Day. The tactic of revisiting the same event from varying perspectives works superbly, forcing us to keep reconsidering our judgments of these understandably inner-directed, highly fallible people. And Scott creates some wonderful effects with Bo’s limited viewpoint (“he kept running away from Marge and Eddie because he understood it to be a wonderful game . . . “) and embryonic perceptions (his “meeting” with a fox seen prowling near the Gilberts’ car vividly illustrates the range of even a very young child’s muscular imagination). A risk-taking book, unafraid to court sentimentality and melodrama in an effort to show how profoundly well-meaning people can unintentionally shatter one another’s lives. Scott just keeps getting better.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77616-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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