Hair-raising, funny and surprising; an indulgent page-turner that might keep you off the water.
A bloody, cinematic romp through backwoods Illinois.
Reading Young’s debut book is a lot like going to the movies. The setup—teenage friends embark on a wild, ill-fated weekend aboard a houseboat—is straight out of a horror flick, and Young’s short, single-location chapters have the feel of movie scenes. Needless to say, fans of thrillers and slasher films will have plenty of fun joining lovebirds Peter and Maggie and company on their eventful trip down the Illinois River. Young’s exposition is particularly well-executed, alternating glimpses of Peter and his two friends’ drunken joyride to the marina with Maggie and a pair of sisters making their own stoned way there. In true horror-movie fashion, each group has some unsettling encounters that fail to make them turn back: The boys cause a ruckus at a wine shop after making moves on some older women, the girls get ogled by some locals at a grocery store, and Maggie’s stop to buy pot reveals she’s been distracting herself with a charming but decidedly creepy dealer while Peter’s been away at college. Once the gang’s out on the water, all hell breaks loose, with characters dying one by one—killed and consumed by mysterious shadowy figures who hunger for human flesh. Readers will require a high tolerance (or taste) for gore if they’re to enjoy the better part of Young’s book. Still, there’s more than just violence here: humor and a sly camp sensibility run through the story as well. Throughout, Young makes a point to note the songs playing at particular moments, “Bad Luck” and “Killing Me Softly” among them. While the mythology underlying the killings, featuring an ancient, proto-Aztec community of cannibals, seems more convoluted than the plot requires, Young nonetheless sustains suspense through the very last page, and his simple, straightforward writing makes for an engaging though not overly taxing read.
Hair-raising, funny and surprising; an indulgent page-turner that might keep you off the water.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477696613
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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