Lucretia and the Kroons (Kindle Single) (edition 2012)

*ARC received from Netgalley for review purposes*

This - and other reviews - can be found on my blog (un)Conventional Bookviews

Lucretia - Loochie - Gardner is twelve years old, and her best friend, Sunny is very sick with cancer. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Victor LaValle's Lucretia and the Kroons is a frustrating reading experience, because it's full of great ideas that are mostly handled poorly, or at the least with poor material added to either side of the great idea, so that what could've been a tight little alt-horror tale instead became a rambling thing that made me frown a lot while going through it and say to myself, "Oh. Really? That's the direction you're going with this? Ugh. Okay." A literal Poor Black Child In The Ghetto story, our titular hero is a precociously holier-than-thou and Dickensian-put-upon little girl in a Queens housing development, where I guess supposedly there used to be a family of crackheads in the apartment upstairs? Who, like, all died grisly deaths and then became ghosts or something? Or are, hmm, I don't know, like abducting human girls and taking them to this weird alt-history J-horror fantasyland version of New York City? Or maybe they're some alien race who were only posing as crackheads to fool people in the real world? Or, uh, something? That's a major problem with this ambitious but messy manuscript, that LaValle quickly seems to lose track of what he's trying to say in the first place, bouncing from one random horror trope to the next like a pinball (and including some pretty bad non-horror cliches as well, including The Best Friend With Cancer, the Overworked Single Mother, the Older Brother With Complicated Family Relationship and more), none of it ever quite fitting together into a consistent internal mythology. It's got some great mental images, and certainly LaValle's to be commended for the grand scope of what he tries to pull off; but this is more of a miss than a hit in my opinion, an admirable but scattershot experiment that will hopefully lead to stronger and more mature work from this promising writer.

Out of 10: 7.7 ( )

Lucretia and the Kroons is a novella with all the punch of a full-length novel. It's not often that authors write about children dealing with their friends' deaths, but Victor LaValle is not afraid.

Lucretia's best friend, Sunny, suffers from an illness (probably cancer) that has slowly taken her away from her friend. Treatment and medication have rendered her almost unrecognizable, but still Lucretia remains faithful. Then comes the day when Sunny disappears and Lucretia finds herself on a mad and frightening and marvelous adventure into the unknown with only a mysterious and monstrous woman as her guide.

I very much enjoyed this book. It was sweet and genuine and scared the pants off of me. Mr. LaValle has a great way with words and storytelling and opens a big picture window for his readers and characters to step through. Wonderful read and appropriate for middle grade kids and all of us older kids who aren't easily frightened or just love to be scared! ( )

After a slow start of Lucretia and the Kroons telling the story of a a children's party, where one girlfriend is missing because she has contracted cancer. Loochie learns about The Kroons, once neighbours on the 6th floor in the same appartment building. The Kroons were crackheads and turned to cruelties. Having played with wigs and a cigarette Loochie applies make-up and thinks she's Lucretia. Is she dreaming or is it real, when she climbs the fire escape of her Queens appartment building and crawls into the 6D appartment herself, finding The Kroons alive and kicking. An adventurous shadowland journey starts. Monsters, horror playgrounds and loosing all that you love. This metaphor of the devastating effects of cancer may serve coping with this disease better at younger age, but as an adult this novella doesn't have that much magic. ( )

Being young doesn't protect you. Horrors come for kids, too.

Never heard of Victor Lavalle before? That's OK, neither had I until I received a notice from NetGalley saying that this book was available for review. After reading Lucretia, I think this is something that I think I need to fix. Lucretia and the Kroons is a prequel of sorts to Victor Lavalle's The Devil in Silver and if The Devil in Silver is anywhere near as good as Lucretia, I think I'm in for a treat. A creepy treat, but a treat all the same. (Full disclosure here, I had no idea that Lucretia and the Kroons was anything more than a standalone story. I only discovered it was a prequel after I looked up Lavalle after reading the story.)

After Lucretia's (or Loochie's) mom tries to throw her a birthday party (to disastrous results), all she wants is for her friend Sunny to come home from hospital, where she is undergoing cancer treatment. On the big day of Sunny's return, Loochie's brother comes to their apartment and tells Loochie about the Kroons, a family of druggies who lived 2 floors above them in their apartment building. According to her brother, the landlord boarded the Kroons into their apartment to let them fend for themselves, as they had become far too dangerous to deal with, and nobody had seen them in quite some time. Loochie isn't sure if her brother is telling the truth or if he's just trying to scare her, but either way he tells her to be careful, as terrible things can still happen to her even though she is young. When Sunny is kidnapped by none other than the Kroons, Loochie takes it upon herself to rescue her best friend.

What follows is hard to describe. It is equal parts horror, magical realism, and coming of age. Loochie finds herself in a world gone wrong, yet one that is strangely familiar. Loochie eventually finds Sunny and saves her, but at what cost to either girl, or the one Kroon sister that has come to their aid? Based on the description of The Devil in Silver, the events of Lucretia and the Kroons is the explanation as to how Loochie ends up in the situation she finds herself in.

I know this all sounds really vague, but it needs to be. The story is too easy to spoil and really too hard to explain it without sounding crazy. I felt like I was reading a lost Twilight Zone screenplay. I could imagine what the world Loochie finds herself in easily, and could easily picture what this would look like as a television program or even on the big screen. Everything about this story is just like our world, just a little off. I thoroughly enjoyed ever bit of it, even though it is fairly short, and will definitely be checking out The Devil in Silver in the near future. ( )

Lucretia "Loochie" Gardner is your average twelve-year-old living in Queens. While her best friend Sunny is away receiving treatments for her illness, Loochie is left feeling alienated and alone. She struggles with issues that all young girls go through: fitting in at school, puberty, appearances. So when Sunny finally returns home, Loochie is determined to have fun to make up for their lost time together. That is, until Sunny goes missing and Loochie must find the courage to face the Kroons in apartment 6D and rescue her friend.

Once Loochie enters apartment 6D, she finds herself face-to-face with one of the Kroons. Monsters that are notorious for taking children and burning them. Freeing herself, she runs deeper into the apartment only to find herself in a park, complete with grass, tall trees and even a playground. Running for her life and trying to make sense of her surroundings, Loochie is focused on finding Sunny who she knows is far to weak from her treatments to survive. Imagine Loochie's surprise when Sunny is the one to find her with the help of an unexpected friend.

Lucretia and the Kroons is a well-written short story that is ultimately a story about love and learning to deal with loss. Victor LaValle does a wonderful job showing the reader the emotions Loochie is going through and the ways that she learns to deal with her loss.

This story is listed as a horror but I would personally classify it as a dark fantasy instead because I found the dark elements rather tame to be a horror.

I received a copy of Lucretia and the Kroons via NetGalley when asked by Random House Publishing for an honest review. ( )

This novella, which serves as a prequel to LaValle's latest novel The Devil in Silver, is about Lucretia ("Loochie") Granger, a girl who lives with her mother in an apartment in Queens, NY at the turn of the millenium. Her 12th birthday party was ruined by three mean girls from her school who were unwanted guests invited by Loochie's mother. Her best friend Sunny, a girl who lives in the same building, was undergoing treatment for cancer at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis at that time. Loochie saves a portion of her ice cream birthday cake and plans a private birthday party for herself and Sunny once she returns to Queens two months later. Unfortunately on the day of the party Sunny has apparently been kidnapped by the Kroons, the "neighbors" in a sealed off apartment just above Loochie's home, who are the survivors of a family of crackheads that terrorized the children of the neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s. Loochie climbs the fire escape to rescue her friend, but she is forced to flee for her own life from the murderous, zombie-like Kroons. She enters a bizarre version of Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the two previous World's Fairs in NYC, through a room in the apartment, while the Kroons are in hot pursuit of her.

This was an interesting horror story, but it isn't essential to a reading of The Devil in Silver, and it wasn't nearly as good as that very enjoyable novel. ( )

Okay, so this is a pretty unique story. The first half is set in the real world with Lucretia, nicknamed Loochie, having a birthday party for herself. She loosely fits in with three girls who I have to say are real snots who her mother has invited to her house for a party. It doesn't end well. Loochie throws them out calling them whores. She puts her ice cream cake back in the freezer and tells her mom she'll celebrate her birthday when her bestfriend, Sunny comes home from cancer treatment in Tennessee. It did surprise me that Sunny was in Tennessee getting treatment when they lived in NYC with supposedly the best doctors and I always assumed the best facilities and treatments for cancer.

Months later, Sunny comes home and Loochie is in denial. She sees how frail her friend is, how hard she has to work to breathe, but she still thinks her friend is coming down to spend a few hours with her and they'll celebrate her birthday. While waiting her brother drops by to pick her mom up for lunch. He tells her about the Kroons in 6D who snatch little kids and burn them up. That they almost got him one time. He tells her, "Being young doesn't protect you. Horrors come for kids, too." Loochie's mind is focused on the Kroons as she listens to sirens wail up the street and stop at her building. She knows there are a lot of old people in her building and wonders who they came for. It never enters her mind that it could be for Sunny.

Circumstances lead her to the fire escape again where she sees Sunny's grandmother bent over with wracking sobs. The Kroons have Sunny and Loochie is on her way to get her back. In through the window she goes and immediately her belt and shoes are snatched off of her by a strange man with a dented face.
She gets loose and thus begins her journey into the strange land of 6D. There is a park there, the one she and Sunny always visited, Flushing Meadows. And though it's a bit askew, it is their park and she knows exactly where to find Sunny. She is chased by the Kroons but escapes several times and comes to the Playground for Lost Children. There isn't a child in sight. Just abandoned toys all over. And she wonders if this is where Sunny and all the other sick children go. But there are no bones. So she doesn't give up hope. And that is where she and Sunny are reunited. Sunny is fiesty as ever and they outrun and outsmart the Kroons with the help of one of the other Kroons.

Slowly, as they spend their remaining time together, Sunny explains that she is headed to the Shea, a stadium where kids spend eternity running around sitting wherever they want, never sick. She even thinks her hair might grow back and she'll never have to get more treatments. Loochie asks her to stay, asks her "Don't you love me?" And Sunny asks the same. It's a time of transition, of letting go of Sunny. There is a lot of symbolism in the novel even as they battle the Kroons.

It's a unique story, a prequel to The Devil in Silver, an adult novel, but I think it can stand alone. The last few pages seemed to be tacked onto the story as an after thought and felt a little jarring. Like it hadn't been written by the same author. Lucretia had been written so tenderly and carefully, her time with the Kroons so thoughtfully and symbolic, I just felt the last few pages could have had the same effort put into them.

There is some strong language in it, but only a couple of times and it does deal with death. Use your best judgement as to age appropriateness. This is not billed as YA but could definitely be.

I was asked to review this by Random House publishing. I received a copy for review from NetGalley. I was not compensated for my review. The opinions in my review are my own.

Heather ( )