A darkly vibrant coming-of-age novel, richly textured and full of passion.
The love between two teenage boys is threatened by the homophobia of a football-mad town in this plangent romance.
Hopes’ tale follows four friends growing up in an unnamed small town in the North Carolina mountains in the 1940s: gifted athlete Vince Silvano; oddball Tilden Roundtree; everykid narrator Arden Summers; and Glen Copland, a “sissified” St. Louis transplant who stargazes and collects local flora and fauna. The boys roam the sylvan landscape surrounding a 100-foot waterfall on the Wyona River, a gorgeous but treacherous watercourse that is said to kill one every generation. Vince and Glen covertly fall in love as they start Eddie Rickenbacker High School, where Vince becomes the football team’s star quarterback. Unfortunately, the domineering football coach, who likes to toss around homophobic slurs, is Vince’s dad, and when Coach Silvano discovers the relationship, he quashes it by administering a beatdown to Vince. Tensions come to a head when Glen appears at homecoming dance and kisses Vince on the lips. Hopes’ yarn vividly portrays the fervent bond between young boys—camping out, bantering, double-daring each other into crazy stunts by the falls—with its occasional erotic undertow, and the way it fractures under the pressure of stereotypes and bigotry. His young characters are full of vigor but also experience poignant, tongue-tied confusion over their warring impulses. Hopes’ prose is intense and evocative, infusing nightmarish scenes with a mordant lyricism: “Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow...The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down.” The result is a gripping read with an undercurrent of elegiac yearning.
A darkly vibrant coming-of-age novel, richly textured and full of passion.Pub Date: May 23, 2019
ISBN: 9781597098939
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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