Well crafted if unsurprising.
In a competent first outing, a young woman’s search for her brother among environmental malcontents in New Mexico becomes a quest to find herself.
Lynn Fleming is sleepwalking her way through a Brooklyn summer when her mother demands she come home to rescue her brother from the “Eco-freaks” who have turned him against her. Lynn’s own life is on hold. Her grant money for a neglected dissertation on feminist artists of the ’60s and ’70s is about to dry up, and her affair with Michael, her gadfly married advisor, has hit the skids except for his occasional late night appearances “reeking sweetly of gallery wine.” To Lynn’s credit, given the choice of Albuquerque or Michael’s last-minute invite to Paris, she heads home to the Southwest, her widowed mother, her “lost” brother, Wylie, and the city she hates. She’s soon irrevocably involved in Wylie’s politics and his apartment mates. Her affair with one of the main Eco-pranksters, Angus Beam, leads to her participation in the group’s plots to drain private swimming pools (a waste of water) and close down access to the mountains outside the city (to create a wilderness area), while her mother carries on a blatant affair with David, the married lawyer who lived next door to the Flemings in their old neighborhood. Add to this chaos the mystery of the two sexually provocative paintings by a 1970s artist named Eva Kent that Lynn rediscovers in her mother’s condo. A Pandora’s box of disturbing questions fly out. Was her mother having an affair with David when her father was alive? Where did her father get these paintings? Did he have an affair with Eva Kent, who had a child, lost her mind, and destroyed all her work? The plot lines converge in tragic and comic ways until Lynn struggles out from underneath the confusion, faces the past and is able to move on to her future.
Well crafted if unsurprising.Pub Date: May 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41524-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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