A well-researched mystery punctuated by thrilling tension and deep emotion.
Haddleton’s debut is a striking, multifaceted take on the family-secret novel.
In the year 1900, Darby Walker makes the trek across Florida’s Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg; his brother Tulley’s lighthouse has gone dark, and their father is dead under suspicious circumstances. The timelines are split between this urgent present and the brothers’ childhood, starting with Darby’s birth in 1865. These sections provide background on the bitter conflicts between gregarious, sensitive Darby and boundary-pushing, standoffish Tulley, but they also delve deeper into the Walker family’s roots and its history in Cape Cod. Haddleton’s use of multiple time periods offers various perspectives on both Darby’s and Tulley’s backstories. Most strikingly, the novel outlines the life of the boys’ grandfather Nathaniel, a staunch abolitionist who once helped to free slaves from Florida plantations. Nathaniel’s history in particular sets up powerful themes, connecting the family to the land and seas of Florida and Massachusetts as well as their participation in historical events and prejudices. Some paths, like Nathaniel’s, are heroic, but others contain dark chapters that pit brother against brother, foreshadowing Darby and Tulley’s present-day conflict. The nuanced exploration of these themes of compassion and strife would be enough to recommend the book, but it also drives the plot in the present as Darby questions Tulley about his role in their father’s death. The writing here lends a strong sense of place to the proceedings, as do thorough—but not overwhelming—details on ships, lighthouses, and the sea: “Darby only had to make it six miles across the bay….There were no passengers aboard to complain about the rough ride or about getting wet, and a little salt water on the boat didn’t concern Darby in the slightest.” With the initial murder mystery linking all these disparate elements together, this must-read novel maintains a consistent, compelling sense of tension and feeling.
A well-researched mystery punctuated by thrilling tension and deep emotion.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949066-23-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Onion River Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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