From Publishers Weekly
The "tycoon hermit of children's literature," Peter Hook, kidnaps the child star of the upcoming film version of his hero's adventures
Jim Yang: The Movie. The book is constructed as a confession foisted by Hook on the bound and drugged child star Keiko Kai, one that reels back through Hook's life story. Hook's parents were an emblematic '60s couple: his mother, Alexandra Swinton-Menzies, was a modish scion of the aristocracy; his father, Sebastian Compton-Lowe, was the leader of a cult band, the Victorians; the mysterious death of a brother, Baco, unfolds as Hook's confession reaches its end and relates to the deaths of Hook's parents. All of this took place before Hook's childish eyes, through which we also see, in the style of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, celebrated '60s people. Into this mix, Fresán, an Argentina-born, 10-novel veteran making his debut in English, inserts the life of Peter Pan's creator, J.M. Barrie (of whom there is a statue in London's Kensington Garden), Barrie's nonsexual cuckolding of Arthur Llewelyn-Davies and his slow takeover of the Llewelyn-Davies family. Unfortunately, Barrie's story threatens to do the same thing with Fresan's novel. Fresan has things to say about childhood, the '60s, history, death and youth, but he does not successfully imagine a character to hang them on.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Booklist
Fresan's debut in English (his nine other books haven't been translated) is the monologue of Peter Hook, pseudonymous author of a hit series of children's novels featuring time-traveling boy bicyclist Jim Yang. Its audience is the actor chosen to star in the first Jim Yang movie. He is bound and gagged, abducted to hear the harangue and join Hook in out-the-window flight a la Peter Pan. Hook's discourse interweaves his life as the early-orphaned son of aristocratic English musicians who participated in the 1960s British rock efflorescence, and the life of J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. The themes are childhood, time, and nostalgic obsession. The supporting cast of Hook's life consists of famous real people, and the people and events of Barrie's life are only subtly embellished for dramatic purposes. Barrie proves much more interesting than Hook, and Barrie's era much more interesting than the swingin'-London sixties. The rhetorical variety and popular-cultural acuity Fresan gives Hook are pretty spellbinding, amply compensating for an utter absence of plot.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
