First novel, decidedly in the horror vein, by screenwriter Passarella, who carries off a series of familiar ploys with ease if little originality. Purposely dowdy Wendy Ward, the daughter of the president of Danfield College, is deep into witchcraft and works at the local occult store in Windale, a town about 30 miles outside the Ivy League aura of Boston and given up to witchy-named streets and stores echoing its witch-burnings 300 years ago. Wendy, a freshman, is supposed to be studying The House of Seven Gables, which features a witch-burning, but she’s after bigger fish. She goes into the forest, strips naked, and reciting various occult verses actually brings on a mild rain, and later on Halloween Eve unwittingly unleashes a coven of real witches. Meanwhile, eight-year-old Abbey MacNeil, bothered by knocks and creaks in the night, finds herself witchnapped and strung up in a barn. Also witchbait, unbeknownst to herself, is unmarried Professor Karen Glazer, who teaches a seminar on “Proust, Joyce, Faulkner: Architects of Memory,” is pushing 40, pregnant, and, like Hester Prynne, will not reveal the father (he’s Paul Leeson, the handyman who’s fixing up her house). Then there’s 18-year-old Jack Carter, who goes for a country walk with his girlfriend only to be snatched from the roof of a covered bridge by some kind of big . . . well, flying something. Jack, in fact, found himself flying, then dropped through a barn roof into what happens to be a feeding ground for three witches. Soon there’s an exploding cow and similar monstrous events before Wendy finds herself face to face with extremely ugly, vicious, seemingly unkillable nine-foot witches whose time has come to occupy new bodies—namely, Abbey’s, Wendy’s, and Karen’s soon-to-be-born baby’s. Never mention Hawthorne, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner when writing a fantasy lacking moral force or styled prose. Unjaded younger readers, however, will find crushed eyeballs and a certain evil scariness slapped like fresh meat onto the page.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02480-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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