A litany of lurid and repulsive events involving a female prisoner.
A young woman who escapes a life of ghastly abuse finds herself once again held captive, facing a 24-hour deadline to rejoin her victimizer or be killed.
The novel’s chapters count down from Hour 24. The narrator, known as Angel, is bound up on the concrete floor of a warehouse far from any chance of rescue. Her captor, who has controlled her since age 7, is a monstrous man whom she hates “so much I never gave him a name.” Names are arbitrary in this world. Her captor is only “the man,” who purchased her from the home of her crack-addicted mother where she was kept in a closet. Imprisoned in a basement room for the next eight years, she had human contact with a series of minders, including Night Man, Day Man, and Cleaning Lady. Only the evil man’s son is given a name, albeit an invented one. He is called Isaac and becomes her savior and love. Although never detailed explicitly, the unnamed man is apparently a procurer in Nevada with a stable of prostitutes and extensive connections to organized crime, government officials, and law enforcement. The presumption is that he is all-powerful so there is no escaping his reach. He is grooming Angel, among other girls, to be a prostitute, enslaved permanently to his business. She is ultimately freed through a Byzantine escape plot but that state is short-lived. Beckort (Kingston’s Promise, 2014, etc.) has effectively built up the tension of Angel’s final ordeal through the chapters’ countdown. But the book’s content is primarily a repetition of horrors—countless rapes, assaults, humiliations, and beatings. Almost every character is unrelentingly grotesque and seems beyond redemption. The sinister man hisses, “Every part of you is so sweet, and you taste the best after you’ve been beaten.” Another, called Goon 2, says to Angel: “It’s going to be a lot of fun killing you.” Little more is learned in this tale of torture.
A litany of lurid and repulsive events involving a female prisoner.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9912764-4-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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