A family tale offers skillful dialogue as well as brisk pacing and an effective resolution.
A woman discovers her mother possesses a secret cottage, unleashing a chain of revelations and realizations in this novel.
Eleanor Williams, called Nell, is confused as well as worried when she gets a call from a Hartland, Vermont, hospital saying that her mother, Mary Ellen Reilly, is in intensive care. Vermont? Her mother lives in Massachusetts. Tense with anxiety, Nell rushes to her still-unconscious mother from her New Jersey home to discover a fresh enigma: Mary owns a cottage in Hartland, filled with photos of her covert life going back 20 years, before Nell’s father died. Already subject to insecurity, Nell feels betrayed, her world crumbling: “Wasn’t Mom’s real life good enough? Why did she need to get away from it?” But as she and her older sister Bridget learn more about the cottage and Mary’s friendship with neighbor Jake Bascomb and his son Adam, Nell realizes that in her own home, she has no personal space. To write in her journal, she has to hide in the bathroom, while her husband has both a home office and a man cave. Nell begins to understand why her mother never mentioned the cottage. And as the novel reveals more about its characters, including the Bascombs, buried family secrets come to light and new understandings are reached. In her book, Cleare (Destined, 2011) constructs a well-written examination of how families affect choices, why people keep secrets, and the need for a room of one’s own. The tale retains a sense of mystery as its revelations spill out; one of the greatest riddles, it turns out, is a parent’s real life, the one not shown to children. Nell’s panic at discovering this helps explain the need for secrecy; it’s never an arbitrary plot obstacle. But some things work out a little too neatly or easily and some depend on wealth; in addition, Nell is agonizingly slow at figuring out she should just speak up for what she wants instead of finding a way to manipulate others or not have to ask. Yet many can relate to her dilemma, if not her privilege.
A family tale offers skillful dialogue as well as brisk pacing and an effective resolution.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940215-81-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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