by Coleman Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 2015
A promising tale of an ex-soldier, hampered by a meandering, implausible plot.
In Mitchell’s debut novel, an American Vietnam veteran recovers from severe injuries and wrestles with memories of war.
After his mother dies in an automobile accident, Kelly O’Brian enlists in the Army and serves as a first lieutenant in the infantry in a treacherous stretch of wilderness, the Ho Bo Woods of Vietnam. In May 1969, he’s badly wounded, and after an extended convalescence in Japan, he returns to the United States and pursues a college degree in Florida. Kelly manages to build a life with all the trappings of success and happiness; he eventually heads a multibillion-dollar construction company, marries a woman he deeply loves, and raises a beautiful daughter. Nevertheless, he’s haunted by the trauma that he experienced during the war, and by the “sleeping devils inside of him” that are sometimes awakened when he faces danger. The latter happens with implausible frequency in Mitchell’s novel. While overseeing the construction of a highway through the Panamanian jungle, for example, Kelly is forced to contend with armed bandits; later, he kills a man who’s assaulting a woman and thwarts a terrorist takeover of a commercial plane. The heart of the story, though, is the protagonist’s search for emotional resolution. After a tragedy, he can no longer postpone his need for closure; he experiences a dramatic longing that takes him back to the beginning of his trials—the Ho Bo Woods. The author impressively brings to life the macabre horror of war, and his depictions of frenzied combat have an unalloyed feeling of realism. However, the overall plot isn’t as believable as these scenes are, and what begins as an intriguing psychological drama eventually degrades into a clichéd tale of action and adventure. Also, Mitchell’s prose, and particularly the dialogue, can feel inauthentic and overwritten. For example, when Kelly first asks out his future wife, Cindy, she stiltedly tells him, “Kelly, you seem like a really nice guy. You’re courteous, and you speak well. Even with that dueling scar on your cheek you’re rather handsome.”
A promising tale of an ex-soldier, hampered by a meandering, implausible plot.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63415-444-4
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Coleman Mitchell Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
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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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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