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
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
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
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