Barbieri handles the complex sibling relationship with finesse, but weakens the effect with contrivance and predictability.
A first novel, set in Butte, Montana, about the love-hate relationship between two sisters, one overly responsible, the other wildly irresponsible.
Having just graduated from high school, narrator Erin lives quietly with her widowed mother, an obstetrics nurse, and works at a local vintage-clothing store whose owners (a politically correct gay couple) encourage her in her jewelry-making. Then Erin’s sister Meghan calls home in the middle of a freak July snowstorm. Or, rather, Meghan’s preschool daughter, Teeny, calls from the Pair-a-Dice Motel, where Meghan, Teeny, and baby Si-si are holed up. Since their alcoholic father died when Erin was 13, Meghan, the gifted, ambitious older sister Erin looked up to, has been on a downward spiral of sex, drugs, and Erin is afraid to think what else. Erin and her mother rescue the kids from the rattrap motel and Meghan soon follows. She takes a job at a local bakery and joins AA, Teeny and Si-si begin to thrive, and Erin wants to believe but can’t quite bring herself to trust that Meghan is back on track. In particular, she wonders about the frequent late-night hang-up calls the family’s begun receiving. In one incident after another, Erin and Meghan spar emotionally as they slowly heal old wounds. In an unnecessary subplot, Erin meets an attractive newcomer (no one seems to question an 18-year-old sleeping with a 28-year-old in this fictional world, but then Erin reads like 18 going on 48). Just as Erin is on the verge of renewed faith in Meghan, bad guys from Meghan’s past show up and start shooting. Thirty pages before it ends, the novel switches from a slow accumulation of details in minor key to a pile-up of plot and sudden revelation.
Barbieri handles the complex sibling relationship with finesse, but weakens the effect with contrivance and predictability.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56947-384-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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