An often engaging novel with a touch of magic, hampered by a problematic trope at its center.
In this third book in her Tower Room fantasy series, Davis (Falling, 2017, etc.) takes her Canadian protagonist from 1920s Toronto to 1850s Buffalo, New York, right in the middle of an Underground Railroad escape.
It’s 1929, and Dilys Frank feels exhausted and spiritually empty. Once a nurse for Toronto General Hospital, she now lazily keeps the doors open at the unlicensed Makeshift Pharmacy on behalf of her father, Gus Frank, a gambling photographer, con artist, and thief. Her stress about her father’s shady activities is exacerbated by the recent loss of her baby daughter, Pearl, who was born out of wedlock and lived only a few short weeks. When Gus invites her to his home to show her evidence of his previous time travel, Dilys is skeptical and angry. But when she snoops around the magical tower room, it takes her on her own adventure—landing her in Buffalo in 1850. Once there, she meets Caleb Breneman, a kindly Quaker who needs a nurse to attend a wounded child whom he’s helping along the Underground Railroad. She quickly discovers that she’s not a slave, but the disguised white daughter of a plantation owner named Caroline, who fled with her young friend, a slave named Jackson. When Caroline’s father comes to town, the need to secret the children away to Canada becomes more urgent. Over the course of the novel, Davis presents a story that’s well written, well researched, and features an intriguing central conflict. Although this installment in the series may easily be read as a stand-alone novel, readers will get helpful context if they start from the beginning; the time-travel device, for example, ties the overarching story together, but it’s hardly explained here. Also, some readers may find the white-savior narrative structure, which puts Dilys at the heart of a slave-rescue story, to be distasteful. Overall, though, the novel does effectively manage to bring some historical injustices to light.
An often engaging novel with a touch of magic, hampered by a problematic trope at its center.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5526-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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