An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.
Larum’s West Texas–based debut novel offers interconnected tales of murder and mayhem.
Indian Springs is a place of cattle ranches and oil rigs. It’s the current home of this novel’s large cast of characters, including Evan Blaine, a talented reporter whom guilt and regret follow like a weather front; brothers Dink and Del Downs, the former an innocent and the latter a career criminal; Omero Valdez, a psychopath whom one character calls “a sly one, like a coyote”; and naïve, young Tony Angione, who’s just passing through while hitchhiking from New Jersey to California. The law is represented by Sheriff Leo Blunt and, the next county over, Sheriff Brent Fulton and their underlings; some of them are truly bad to the bone, such as Chief Deputy Matt Ridgeway. The fates of all these luckless people eventually converge: Valdez kills a motel clerk in a $460 robbery, poor Tony gets picked up by the wrong people, and fugitive Del is caught while on the run. A later jailbreak and a hunt across multiple counties for the escapees will keep readers riveted to the end. Larum had a career as a newspaper editor in the West, and it shows; it’s clear that he knows what the particular emptiness of the region feels like—and he makes readers feel it, too. Each chapter focuses on a particular character; most are short but some not, as when Blaine’s past is explored or when Ridgeway and Deputy Jess Bruce track down the hapless Joe Dornick through mesquite on horseback or when Tony and Dink try to extricate themselves from untenable situations. The denouement is very cleverly handled, and it’s no spoiler to say that at least one major character winds up truly happy.
An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9966865-0-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walking Three Bar T Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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