A teenage girl is the strong center of a fever-dream story of hidden pasts.
In an Appalachian hamlet, a girl’s world is shattered by the secrets of the adults around her.
Burns’ first book, Cinderland (2014), was a memoir about her childhood in western Pennsylvania. She sets this assured debut novel nearby, in the remote hollers outside the ominously named Trap. It’s a minuscule, poverty-ridden West Virginia town where the dying coal industry still poisons the environment and the moonshiners of the title still make illegal liquor for tradition’s sake. At age 15, Wren Bird, who narrates much of the book, has never been more than a few miles from her family’s cabin. Her father, Briar, is a snake handler, a preacher whose services, held in an abandoned gas station for a shrinking congregation, revolve around him grasping his venomous rattlers and copperheads and raising them skyward while speaking in tongues. Wren tells the reader, “My father obeyed the rituals of snake-handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet.” Called to God when a lightning strike blinded him in one eye as a teen, Briar fell in love with Wren’s mother, Ruby, not long afterward. He’s ruthlessly protective of his wife and daughter, forbidding most outside contact and only grudgingly letting Ruby home-school Wren. Ruby’s closest relationship is not with Briar but with her longtime friend Ivy, who lives down the mountain with her four kids and opioid-addicted husband. As girls, Ruby and Ivy dreamed of escape, but Ruby—also a snake handler’s daughter—married at her father’s command, and restless Ivy married so she wouldn’t have to leave Ruby. As the novel opens, Ivy falls into an open fire, but it seems Briar has worked a miracle when she suffers no grievous injury. That fall, though, sets off a cascade of revelations and rebellions. And Briar’s lethal snakes are this book’s version of Chekhov’s gun—you know they’re going to bite someone. Wren’s engaging, convincing voice leads the reader through her strange world.
A teenage girl is the strong center of a fever-dream story of hidden pasts.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53364-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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