Crusader Nurse plays Lady Bountiful to the Appalachian poor in this latest Day-Glo medical minimus by book-a-year-man Denker. Kate Kincaid, newly burned by a battle to unseat a malpracticing doctor, leaves a Midwestern university hospital and travels to West Virginia. There she'll study and train for one year at Appalachian Mountain Hospital under the iron rule of heart-of-gold director Abbott, qualifying as a Family Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. Together with two peers, one a nun, Kate does her boot training, studying, and clinic working with the help of resident doc Ray Boyd—who just might, one thinks at this point, elbow out Kate's everloving lawyer-lover Howard Brewster. Meanwhile, Kate also learns how to handle the natives, a poor but proud lot, and "talk folks." Among the hill people: landlady Aunt Elvira Russell, a former nurse; an ancient, tobacco-chewing diabetic who ain't allowing she knows where her sugar's coming from; a rattlesnake-twirling preacher who gets bit; an elderly retired professor of regional anthropology; and child Eloise, only bright chick of a decent, hard-scrabble couple, who writes poetry. (Kate wins her battle to have Eloise educated at IQ level.) Then, after a stretch on the lonesome-trail-and-cabin route, Kate studies midwifery under Dr. Boyd: "for the next six months, you'll be concerned with only one thing. Life!" Predictably there are a number of birthings—one a cabin delivery of extreme difficulty. But Kate will next volunteer to take over an outpost clinic—where bits of diagnosing, jollying, treating, and virtuouso sleuthing ensue. (One man's infertility problem is caused by too-snug jockey shorts.) And finally there's a huge flood from a strip-mining mud slide. . . and guess who comes through as heroine to the whir of TV cameras? With pseudo-Foxfire natives and case after hurting, heaving case: Super Nurse wins all hearts—in a pop formula old as them that hills.
Pub Date: May 1, 1984
ISBN: 0688023657
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984
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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