Dialogue from heaven and storytelling fresh as a gunshot grip each page about the true West.
The greatest living writer of Western historicals (Jericho’s Road, 2004, etc.) sets spurs to a new trilogy.
Looking for the next dream in 1816, Mordecai Lewis leaves Tennessee—and his wife and kids—to head west in search of fresh land to settle. He returns empty-handed but dream-packed. The Lewises have little truck with surveyors and boundaries, they just move west and take up empty land until civilization encroaches on them. Now Mordecai has Homeric tales of the Spanish land called Texas, a limitless spread of golden earth bending past the horizon, whose population of wild horses is protected by the Mexican military, led by the murderous Lieutenant Armando Rodriguez. When Lewis gets a band together to round up a herd of those wild mustangs, self-righteous thief and neighbor Cyrus Blackwood insinuates himself into it. Also along is the series hero, young Michael Lewis. At the Sabine River, Michael meets Marie Villaret and loses his heart, as does she. The backwoodsmen round up a herd and head back to the States, but they’re betrayed by Cyrus Blackwood. Rodriguez and his troops stop and murder the Tennesseans; Michael sees his father’s brains blown out. He manages to get back to the Villaret ranch, where he recovers enough to head home and find Cyrus Blackwood. Trying to bushwhack Michael, young Finis Blackwood gets his arm shot to pieces and later removed. The Blackwoods vow to kill Michael. Rather than ignite a feud that could go on for years and cost his family many lives, Michael sets off west. At the Villaret ranch he hears that Spain will allow 300 American settlers to create farms in Texas. He asks Marie to marry him when he returns with some land to settle.
Dialogue from heaven and storytelling fresh as a gunshot grip each page about the true West.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31021-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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