Review by Booklist Review
In his fourth book, Chabon again displays his nimble irony, sense of narrative adventure, flair for constructing astonishingly thorny predicaments, and remarkable facility with language. If there is a shared theme among the nine glimmering stories collected here, it is the puzzlements of fatherhood. In "Green's Book," a divorced father of a toddler, the charming Jocelyn, feels rueful about his career as a family therapist. In the delectably complex "The Harris Fetko Story," a grown son is reconciled with his estranged father at the bris of his baby stepbrother. And finally, in the wrenching "Son of the Wolfman," a husband struggles mightily to summon the strength to be a father to the child sired by the man who raped his wife. Brief synopses can't begin to convey the rich texture of Chabon's involved tales, or his masterful renderings of the shifting emotional strata of troubled relationships, a sensitivity he gleefully abandons in "In the Black Mill," a marvelously gothic tale, ala Shirley Jackson. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Applying his ironic talents to even darker material than in previous outings, Chabon has produced a winning collection of nine stories. Failed marriages haunt almost all the protagonists; personal disasters, depressive malaise and sexual violence are recurring themes. In "House Hunting," a realtor is more intent on stealing objects from a house than on showing it to his clients, a troubled young couple. His bizarre incompetence increases the tension between them, finally driving them into one another's arms. A young man flees town in "Mrs. Box," hoping to leave the twin disasters of his marriage and his business behind. He stops to visit his wife's senile grandmother and suddenly resolves to rob her of her jewelry, only to find a half-measure of redemption when his plan misfires. In the title story, Paul is the only one on the school playground who can call Timothy back from his werewolf fantasy, but Paul, who is already taunted for smelling weird, can't risk being associated too closely with his strange pal. As a result, Timothy attacks a fellow student and is reassigned to a "Special School." The closing tale, "In the Black Mill," presented as a story by August Van Zorn, a writer Chabon invented in Wonder Boys, is a brilliant riff on pulp horror tales featuring an archeologist who unearths the terrifying secrets of a small town. Here, Chabon is as witty as ever while dispensing with the glibness that sometimes marred his earlier work. His characters, even whey they are silly and flawed, come across as sympathetic, three-dimensional human beings. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This collection of short stories from novelist Chabon (Wonder Boys, Villard, 1995) reveals the intricacies of emotion in the lives of everyday people. Chabon's central figures are beset by divorce: the pressures that cause it, the traumas that accompany it, and the aftershock and readjustment that follow. Whether children or adults, they struggle to manage in situations that are not always so manageable. From the fat boy trying to reunite his estranged parents to the husband helping his wife give birth to the child of a rapist, these remarkably crafted stories explore life at the lunar extreme that brings out the werewolf in the human condition. Yet Chabon magically instills a ray of hope, even in his most desperate characters. For most collections.Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
67941587.498 Chabon, Michael WEREWOLVES IN THEIR YOUTH: A mixed second collection of nine stories by novelist Chabon (A Model World, 1991; Wonder Boys, 1995, etc.), mostly set in the Pacific Northwest. Domestic life has been the dominant subject of literary stories for many years, and the variations on it seem to be pretty well played out by now. Most of the characters in Chabon's tales are afflicted family men and women trying without apparent success to repair their failing relations with spouses or children. "Son of the Wolfman," for example, describes the stress placed upon an already-teetering marriage when the childless wife becomes pregnant as a result of rape and decides to keep the baby. "The Harris Fetko Story" portrays the tensions separating a professional football player from his remarried father. In "Spikes," a husband reluctantly participates in the divorce proceedings initiated by his wife, while "Mrs. Box" tells how a bankrupt optometrist fails in his attempt to rob his ex-wife's senile mother and is robbed himself in the process. Some of the pieces move uncomfortably to the edges of surrealism, where they--re carried too far: "House Hunting," for example (an unhappy young married couple copulate in the bedroom of a house shown to them by a demented real estate agent), and the title story (revealing what happens when two boys" fantasies of becoming werewolves are carried too far). Pretty thin gruel: Chabon is a stylist (--Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by the manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets--) whose finely crafted sentences unfortunately don--t add up to very interesting narratives. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
