Heartfelt vividness breathes life into a soap-ish plot from Hill (Shipwreck Season, 1998, etc.).
A Mississippi preacher’s daughter heads north—and comes home humbled.
In 1927, Cora Harvey dreams of becoming a singer. The gospel hymns she belts out in her father’s congregation have given her voice a soul-stirring fervor—at a time when plenty of coloreds are making names for themselves away from Jim Crow laws. But Cora’s sweetheart, David Mackey, a handsome doctor, wants her to marry him and stay in Rudell. Meanwhile, there are signs of change: a NAACP representative is coming to town, and Cora’s parents are his official hosts. But when they die in a suspicious fire, Cora is devastated. Reluctantly, David lets her go to Chicago to fulfill the dream she set aside when he began to court her. Cora’s overwhelmed by the big city, but she’s soon befriended by good-time girl Margaret, who gets her work bussing tables and, later, cleaning houses. Then, raped by a white employer, William Rutherford, Cora heads home to David’s welcoming arms, never telling him what happened. When her child is born—a girl—it’s only too clear that the father is white. David hightails it two days later. Emma grows up ashamed of her mother for being nothing but cleaning woman, and eventually learns about her real father and goes north to find him. Her pale complexion and brilliant green eyes allow her to pass for white—and she soon has a handsome admirer, Michael Travanti, an Italian-American soldier. They marry shortly after she confronts Rutherford and Michael heads off to war. Not telling him, she gives birth to a daughter, then gives the infant to her mother to raise because the baby’s skin is so dark. Named Parris, the girl grows up knowing none of this, though she’s the one who at long last will reunite and heal the family.
Heartfelt vividness breathes life into a soap-ish plot from Hill (Shipwreck Season, 1998, etc.).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27299-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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