An uneven but engaging story about racism and the transformative power of love.
Eze’s (Leadership Stories of the Mother Hen, 2012) debut novel offers a study of racial prejudice as seen through the eyes of young lovers.
Uchechi grows up in an unnamed village, seemingly in Africa. As a child, Uchechi steals a wresting trophy that his and a neighboring village are fighting over and threatens to throw it in a river, thus preventing a war. Although Uchechi loves his community, his great intelligence and spirit create many options for him, including the opportunity to study at a famous university abroad. Once he arrives, Uchechi encounters racial prejudice for the first time; his naïveté about how to handle it may strike readers as somewhat unrealistic, but it helps showcase the extremity of the racism that he encounters. For example, a classmate, Annarossa, obsessively works to get a higher grade than Uchechi because it would “shame her family” to be surpassed by a dark-skinned boy from “that region.” But when she fails to top him, her view of racial superiority is turned upside down, and she abandons her hostility and tries to learn more about him. She and Uchechi soon fall in love and start on a tumultuous path that crosses forbidden racial boundaries in their town. Despite the novel’s title, the story is less about Uchechi and more about Annarossa’s journey to develop her own beliefs and confront her family’s militant racism. The novel explores racism’s erroneous, rigidly held assumptions, and depicts the courage it takes to stand up against such prejudice, as well as the cost of doing so. Although the story has its compelling moments, there are some clichés and incorrect word choices (“he recollected himself” instead of “he collected himself” and “the dye is cast” instead of “the die is cast”) scattered throughout. Some readers may feel that the narrative has little emotional depth, but the high personal stakes for the characters make it compelling.
An uneven but engaging story about racism and the transformative power of love.Pub Date: March 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456749453
Page Count: 160
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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