An absorbing, enlightening book that exemplifies the power of good storytelling.
Everything changes for Dulce Garcia, perennial party girl and sugar baby, when she meets Zavier, a freelance journalist, on a plane to the Dominican Republic, then gets caught in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.
Dulce, whose parents were Cuban and Dominican, was born in Puerto Rico and has bounced her whole life between the mainland U.S. and the Caribbean. After having been groomed into prostitution while she was in high school in New York—“Dulce always remembered how she was fourteen and wearing a Minnie Mouse t-shirt when she met Jerry,” her pimp—Dulce escaped with the help of Marisol Rivera, the former director of a New York health clinic, but she's soon under the thumb of another abusive boyfriend. Seeking refuge with an aunt in the Dominican Republic, she meets Zavier, a young freelance journalist, as well as Phillip Gerard, a rich businessman. A couple of dates with Zavier has her falling for him, but then Gerard lures her with a luxury hotel stay and a shopping spree, and she convinces herself she didn’t deserve a sweet relationship anyway. Dulce travels with Gerard to Puerto Rico and decides to stay there, then winds up stuck on the island when Maria hits. Meanwhile, Marisol’s Puerto Rican cousins are in dire straits after the hurricane takes out their home, and as they and Dulce make their ways to safety, their stories will converge. Dulce reconnects with Zavier, whose press credentials give her opportunities she never dreamed possible even as their relationship fractures, while her connection to Gerard is of great interest to Marisol, who targets him for a cryptocurrency sting after he raises money ostensibly to help the island but then uses it to acquire prime island property at rock-bottom prices. The fourth title in de León’s genre-bending Justice Hustlers series is a multifaceted tale. On one level, it's an entertaining feminist heist tale with a satisfying Robin Hood–style caper or two, but where the book truly shines is in spotlighting the challenges facing former sex workers and in angling an unflinching lens on the plight of Puerto Rico, both before and after the Maria disaster.
An absorbing, enlightening book that exemplifies the power of good storytelling.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1579-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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