A man and a woman fall for each other, but this is a love story with a difference: the woman happens to be a werewolf. (David Garnett's Lady Into Fox is this first novel's next-of- kin.) Alice White was 13 when she first turned into a wolf, on her family's Virginia farm: ``It was the most joyous event of her young life.'' Since then, every full moon, she has become a wolf, turning human again by dawn. Now Alice is 32, and the playful wolf in the woods is a distant memory. After a grisly episode in which her wolf-self killed a farmhand about to rape her, Alice kept human contact to a minimum. She moved to Richmond, locking herself in the basement at full moons; instead of a boyfriend, she has had a series of one-night stands. Then two things happen: she sees a psychiatrist, and though Dr. Adams does not believe her ``delusions,'' he shows her how she can, through self- hypnosis, summon or banish the wolf at will. Second, Alice and her university adviser, wildlife biologist Erik Summers, fall in love. Making love to Erik, she rediscovers the freedom of the woods; she tells him her story. Fearful and unconvinced, Eric betrays Alice by turning to his manipulative ex-wife Debra; in a jealous fury, Alice forces Debra to witness a woman-to-wolf transformation, then flees to a Canadian wolf sanctuary, pursued by a remorseful Erik. Though Alice might be a National Enquirer item, Danvers's whole idea is to embed her in an ordinary world of messy relationships. Ironically, while he succeeds absolutely with the extraordinary (the images of Alice's transformations are stunningly right), he flounders elsewhere, diluting the intensity of Alice and Erik's love affair through the use of four different viewpoints and gratuitous excursions into the shrink's private life. Still, the novel is just bold and piquant enough to give it a shot at the best-seller lists.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72827-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
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
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