Fowler’s clever insights eventually sink in as more profound than they initially seemed.
A prickly, computer-age take on the mystery genre, from Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club, 2004, etc.).
Twenty-nine-year-old Ohio schoolteacher Rima Lanisell comes to Santa Cruz, Calif., to stay with her godmother Addison Early. The famous author of a mystery series featuring detective Maxwell Lane, Addison is an eccentric who creates a dollhouse miniature of her crime scene before actually writing each novel. Rima is curious about Addison’s relationship and eventual falling out with Rima’s recently deceased father, a well-respected journalist whose name Addison used for the wife-murderer in one of her novels. Shortly after Rima’s arrival at Addison’s house, a wayward fan steals a miniature body from one of the dollhouses. While Rima becomes obsessed with hunting down the perpetrator, that theft seems as close to scary crime as the novel is going to get. Although Rima is mourning not only her father’s but also her adored, risk-taking only brother’s death, the tone remains light and mocking (and predictably, though jarringly, hostile to the Bush administration). Addison’s household includes a cast of gently comical updated gothic stereotypes, including a housekeeper with a shady past, her alienated son and a blogging dog-walker who informs Rima that Addison and Maxwell Lane are popular topics online. Logging on, Rima soon finds the distinction between fact and fiction blurring in regard to her father, Addison and even herself. Along the way she finds a stash of fan letters sent to Maxwell. She writes back to one in Maxwell's name. She also begins wondering how her father knew the letter writer, once a member of a local right-wing religious cult. Only astute readers will wade through the sometimes annoying barrage of disjointed, quirky twists to find the hints planted that there may once have been a real murder involving the cult, and that Rima’s father may have been involved.
Fowler’s clever insights eventually sink in as more profound than they initially seemed.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15475-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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