How could such a talented writer be led so astray? Blame the bad faerie Self-Indulgence.
Imagine a mashup of J.M. Barrie and Armistead Maupin, and you’ll sense the disorienting weirdness of this third novel from Adrian (The Children’s Hospital, 2006, etc.).
Buena Vista Park in San Francisco is hilly, wooded and just big enough to get lost in. That’s what happens to three strangers making their separate ways to a party they’ll never reach. Henry, Will and Molly are linked by more than having lost their way. These lonelyhearts, all three damaged by unhappy childhoods, have also lost their significant others. And they are mortals, unlike the faeries living under the hill who, presto change-o, we meet next. Their world too is newly shaped by loss. Titania, their Queen (ring any bells?), has lost her Boy, the changeling she doted on, to leukemia. And she may have lost the King, Oberon, who has disappeared after Titania’s disavowal of her love for him. Unwisely, she frees Puck (aka the Beast) from his 1,000-year bondage, panicking the faerie world. The Beast is at large! Flee! That’s the extent of the plot. The mortals live for us through flashbacks. Henry was once a changeling himself, under the hill; so was Molly’s boyfriend Ryan who, plagued by dim memories, hanged himself. The mortals enter the hill; Molly sees Ryan’s portrait in a gallery (Barrie’s Lost Boys). Henry and Ryan were abducted twice, the second time by a mortal predator. Henry, now gay, became a pediatrician; Titania’s Boy was his patient, the Queen beside his bed disguised as a mortal. She can change into anything at any time, and that’s a problem. There is no terra firma. For the reader, the experience is like walking backward through quicksand. In his previous work, Adrian did a better job of balancing loss and death with fantasy and the supernatural. Here there is careful patterning but no unifying sensibility.
How could such a talented writer be led so astray? Blame the bad faerie Self-Indulgence.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-16641-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
© 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.
