Readable and slight.
A boy in rural southern Italy learns about crime firsthand when he discovers that his own father is part of a kidnapping gang. Rich in setting and detail, Ammaniti’s third, his first to be published here, rests contentedly on its YA bedrock.
Michele Amitrano is nine when one hot summer day in 1978 he falls—literally—onto a boy his own age being held prisoner, chained in the bottom of a deep pit out in the country. Michele is with a group of four or five kids from his village—including his five-year-old sister Maria—when he plummets out of a tree right onto the hidden pit, which is covered by a mattress and sheet of corrugated Fiberglas, but he decides at once not to tell any of them (“He was mine. He was my secret discovery”). How, though, could Michele have known that changes at home—his truck-driver father having recently come back to stay instead of making more long hauls, for example—were connected with the bound and bloodied boy in the pit (Filippo Carducci by name, as Michele will learn from the TV news)? The arrival—as a houseguest, the children are told—of an old man named Sergio Materia, and then the gatherings of still other men, who argue angrily among themselves around the dining table into the wee hours—all are ominous signs. After Michele is discovered out at the pit trying to comfort Filippo, not only is he beaten up by gang-helper Felice (“Felice Natale was Skull’s big brother. If Skull was bad, Felice was a thousand times worse”), he’s made to swear never to go back to the pit again, since if he does, his father says, Filippo will certainly be shot. But Michele promised Filippo he’d return. Which will prove stronger: oath to father or promise to the boy? Either way, something terrible is going to happen.
Readable and slight.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-84195-297-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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