Completely juvenile and thoroughly enchanting.
Silly and very droll debut by a London paleontologist who likes pirates and has obviously grown up on old Monty Python reruns.
The story of the high seas, daring, romance, ham, and men who like to dress up in women’s clothing begins in the 1850s near the Galapagos Islands, where a crew of jolly—very jolly—pirates loll about the beach all day, planning sumptuous Ham roasts and toying with astrolabes (or possibly sextants—they can never quite get them straight). Worried that discipline is getting slack, the Pirate Captain decides to take his men to sea and set upon the first vessel they find, which happens to be the Beagle, with Darwin aboard. After ransacking the ship for not much plunder, the pirates agree to spare Darwin’s life in exchange for a trip back to London with him and his trained chimpanzee, Bobo. Darwin expects to make a fortune off Bobo on the music-hall circuit, though he faces stiff opposition from the dastardly Bishop of Oxford, Soapy Sam Wilberforce, who has invested heavily in P.T. Barnum’s traveling freak show and dislikes competition. The bishop has gone so far as to kidnap Darwin’s brother Erasmus in hopes of persuading Darwin to cancel the show. Back in London, Darwin puts the pirates up at the Royal Society, passing them off as scientists. Bobo takes the West End by storm (his enactment of The Journal of the Plague Year is a great smash), and the pirates are soon the toast of the town. They manage to save Erasmus, vindicate Darwin, and thwart the bishop’s scheme for extracting the life force from nubile young women (hint: the machine won’t work on men in drag). They even manage to invent a dirigible and go a fair way toward getting Darwin laid. All that’s missing are some silly songs and Terry Gilliam animations.
Completely juvenile and thoroughly enchanting.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42321-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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