A far-fetched novel with too much going on.
In Ahern’s latest (The Gift, 2009, etc.), a family’s secrets lurk in the ruins of an Irish castle.
Tamara, who is 16 but has always felt older, one day finds herself abruptly evicted from her old life. After her father, George, a mega-rich developer, kills himself in the man cave of his Dublin McMansion, his wife, Jennifer, and Tamara learn that he has lost everything to the global real-estate bubble. They move in with Tamara’s country uncle, Arthur, who lives in the gatehouse of Kilsaney Castle with his high-strung wife, Rosaleen. At the gatehouse, Tamara braces herself for a long summer. Her mother is in a near-catatonic state of grief, rarely leaves her bedroom and sleeps most of the time. Rosaleen, when she’s not cooking gargantuan meals, is discouraging Tamara from doing almost anything, from getting the mail to trying to persuade Jennifer to get out of bed. While exploring near the Castle, which was gutted by a long-ago fire, Tamara meets Sister Ignatius, who keeps bees in a walled garden. Sister Ignatius promises never to lie to Tamara, but she’s oddly circumspect when quizzed about Rosaleen’s eccentricities. Boys help relieve the tedium. Should Tamara tell Marcus, the hunk who drives the Bookmobile, that she’s still jailbait? There's also winsome Weseley, Arthur’s summer helper. Weseley’s father, a doctor, makes a house call to treat Jennifer, but Rosaleen drives him away. At the bungalow across the street, Tamara stumbles on enough blown glass to stock several art fairs, but who is the artist? All this would be perplexing enough for Tamara to puzzle out on her own, but Ahern introduces a superfluous note of paranormal activity: a blank diary that periodically tells Tamara, in her own handwriting, what will happen the next day. The diary chronicles the inevitable and the avoidable: It’s up to Tamara to figure out which is which.
A far-fetched novel with too much going on.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-170630-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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