An unsatisfying thriller that nonetheless contains insights into familial wounds.
Degani’s affable debut, a suspenseful novel about mothers and daughters, aims to be thrilling, socially relevant and heartwarming all at once.
Abbie Palmer feels unfulfilled. The married English professor with two children has never figured out what she wants from life. The heart of the problem lies in her unresolved issues with her mother, a movie starlet from Hollywood’s golden age,who committed suicide in the 1950s. When an African-American woman claiming to be Abbie’s half sister dies in a mysterious fire, Abbie and the dead woman’s daughter, Makenna, set out to learn the truth—not only about the fire, but also about the passions and pains of Abbie’s mother’s short life. This plot allows Degani to wade into some heady, race-related waters, including present-day hate crimes and past taboos regarding interracial relationships. However, she avoids diving too deep into these subjects, never swimming too far from the shore of her standard thriller plot. Although the book regularly reminds readers that Abbie and Makenna are in danger, the prose lacks gravitas, often relying on clichés (“My heart skips a beat”; “The past is past and maybe it should stay that way”) and overexplanations, which sometimes make the novel feel like a Nancy Drew mystery in which nothing much is at stake. The plotting also disappoints, as Abbie and Makenna have little trouble solving the mystery; each clue hides in plain sight, and the right person always shows up at the right time, making everything too easy for the amateur sleuths. It all leads to an ending that tries to be heartwarming but instead tips the scale into sappiness. That said, Abbie is a likable narrator, self-aware (“I’m a regular Kinsey Milhone from those alphabet mystery books”) and self-deprecating (“I’m ‘on leave’ from my husband to—do what? Find myself? Oh, God”). Also, in her portraits of mother-daughter relationships, Degani finds genuine weight, even if she sometimes struggles to bear it.
An unsatisfying thriller that nonetheless contains insights into familial wounds.Pub Date: April 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988125780
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Every Day Novels
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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