An entertaining suspense thriller, set during the last days of 1999 and featuring the discovery of ancient, explosive religious revelations in a series of scrolls. Wood has dealt previously with the spiritual odysseys of feisty females (The Dreaming, 1991, etc.), as well as with archaeological adventures. But this is also a tale of a pair on the run, and their adventures carry the story beyond its preachments, however worthy. Catherine Alexander, an enterprising archaeologist with feminist scores to settle—principally with the Catholic Church—finds in her Sinai dig six ancient papyrus scrolls containing not only the name of Jesus but also pointing to the possibility of women priests in the early church. To protect her finds from a greedy establishment, Catherine decides to smuggle them out of the country and enlists the help of her old friend Daniel, another archaeologist. To her dismay and puzzlement, it is a handsome young priest, Fr. Michael Garibaldi, who in turn comes to the pair's aid as a number of enemies close in. Among the pursuers eager for the scrolls: mega-mouth Miles Havers, the ultimate collector, and his lethal hirelings; the Catholic Church; the Egyptian government; and then, following Daniel's death, the state police of California. There will be two murders, pursuits and escapes, and deadly games via cyberspace as Havers's brilliant computer expert gleefully surfs to find Catherine and the priest. Between alarms (and a bit of forbidden passion) and mutual confessions, Catherine translates the six scrolls—the account of a first-century woman who had travelled the known world searching for ``the Righteous One.'' Visits to a quiet cloister (and its secrets) in Vermont and a Vatican necropolis lead to the discovery of a revelatory Seventh Scroll. The religious message here—mainstream unitarian with a mere whiff of New Age—is benign and appealing, but the pace is set by that ``pair of daring adventurers running through cyberspace . . . defying death, going for the prize.'' Fox and hounds with uplift.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-81652-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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