Hyde knows how to punch all the emotional hot buttons but neither plot nor characters are believable or original.
Hyde’s newest (Diary of a Witness, 2009, etc.), about two sisters looking for a home after their mother's death, straddles the fence between adult and YA fiction.
After their mother dies in a car crash with her latest live-in boyfriend in New Mexico, 16-year-old Carly is afraid she and her 11-year-old sister, Jen, will end up separated in foster care. The only person approaching family in their lives is previous “step-father” Teddy, who lived with them back in California until her mother accused him of attempting to abuse Jen; Carly is so sure her mother made up her claim as an excuse to leave him for Wade that she refused to talk to her right up until her death. Carly has no address for Teddy, but she sets out with less enthusiastic Jen to find him. After 10 days of walking, they make it to Arizona, where Delores, a 91-year-old elder of the (fictional) Wakapi tribe, catches them trying to steal eggs from her henhouse. Delores makes them work for her for 10 days in supposed retribution while she feeds and houses them. Jen quickly bonds with Delores, whose rough veneer covers a tender heart not unlike Carly’s. Jealous that everyone likes Jen better and hurt that Jen has adapted to life on the farm more easily, Carly redoubles her efforts to find Teddy. When Jen refuses to leave with her this time, Carly sets out on her own, hitching rides and riding the train—in a harrowing display of physical endurance—until she arrives at the seaside town where Teddy has landed with a new girlfriend. Carly, who inhabits a politically correct world in which white rednecks are all evil and all Native Americans are noble upholders of moral goodness, is a familiar literary convention: the spunky innocent who talks tough to hide her vulnerability.
Hyde knows how to punch all the emotional hot buttons but neither plot nor characters are believable or original.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-611097979
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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