A gruesome ordeal unredeemed by wit or much drama.
Defying her powerful father, a husband honors his dying wife’s wish for a wilderness canoe trip, in Christian-fiction author Martin’s secular debut (When Crickets Cry, 2006, etc.).
Doss Michaels, raised poor in a Georgia trailer park, is a starving art student working and living in a cold-water studio in Charleston, S.C. When he rescues supermodel Abbie, daughter of upper-crust Charlestonian Senator Coleman, from a boardwalk thug, she visits Doss’s studio and makes him her personal gentrification project. Abbie and Doss, both 21, marry in a civil ceremony, alienating her father and stepmother. Abbie becomes a successful interior designer, eclipsing her father’s fame, at least among Charleston’s elite. Doss’s decor-friendly paintings also take off. Abbie leads Doss on a grand world tour of museums where he’s exposed to Renaissance work he’d only seen in art books. After ten years of marriage, while visiting New York City, the couple is horrified when a lump in Abbie’s breast is discovered. Four years of “slash, poison and burn” cancer therapy leave Abbie a mutilated, desiccated remnant of her former self, but with her indomitable spirit intact. Sentenced to hospice, she urges Doss to take her down the St. Mary’s River, where Doss once worked as a guide. Equipped with two canoes, one for supplies including a stolen cache of sophisticated opiates, they embark on Abbie’s final to-do list: ride a merry-go-round, sip umbrella drinks on a beach, etc. They narrowly escape ambush by four psychopathic rednecks right out of Deliverance. Further downriver, after Doss and Abbie encounter a friendlier group of classic-rock-loving, beer-swilling biker types, the bad rednecks return to a deserted boathouse where the duo has sought shelter. In a sensationally off-putting scene, the thugs discuss whether to rape Abbie, and Doss, this time, can’t intervene. Considerable longueurs result from much nature gazing on the river, and the least stereotypical character, Bob, a crop-dusting defrocked priest, appears too briefly.
A gruesome ordeal unredeemed by wit or much drama.Pub Date: July 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2698-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
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
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