Bad vibes and sadistic fantasies are all that keep this limp story afloat.
Trying times in Tucson for a teenager and her neighbor.
Set in the same Arizona city as his story collection, Naked Pueblo (1999), Poirier’s second novel tracks the lives of 16-year-old Kendra Lumm and 30-year-old Merv Hunter. Kendra has been lifting weights since she was ten and now has a magnificently muscular body, but she’s not a happy camper; she pushed older brother Thomas so hard she broke both his arms. Now she’s seeing a counselor, though the reason for her anger is not hard to find. She’s not nearly as smart as skinny Thomas, and her mangled speech is as embarrassing as acne. Might she be a retard, she wonders dismally? Neighbor Merv is not much better off. True, he likes his job as manager of a waterslide park, but he doesn’t have a girlfriend and still lives with his mother, who may be going crazy—Kendra saw her in the desert clutching some electrical appliances, and escorted her home. Neither of these unhappy people is sympathetic. Kendra’s hair-trigger temper is a turnoff, and Merv is a sad-sack. Instead of a plot, we have a question: What’s behind the disappearance of Kendra’s former boyfriend Petey Vaccarino, and is it linked to a bunch of sinister meth-heads? But Petey is a fringe character, and the meth-heads are here for atmospherics, a backdrop for characters always on the boil. Kendra and homeboy Miguel want to have sex, but they end up screaming obscenities; Merv does have sex with Melissa, a knockout, but that ends in recriminations, too. Even a poetry class at the community college dissolves into name-calling. Somehow it’s no surprise at the end when Merv, who should be on top of the world after a terrific job upgrade, looks at his mother, by now a recovering lunatic with a sharp tongue, and decides he wants to break her jaw.
Bad vibes and sadistic fantasies are all that keep this limp story afloat.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0042-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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