Excellent war and, when the guns aren’t firing, equally fine peace.
Hickam sends his recurring hero, Josh Thurlow, to the World War II invasion of Tarawa and then off to an edenic atoll with a few stalwart troops and a complicated Irish nun who hopes he will carry out her own battle plan.
Introduced in The Keeper’s Son (2003), U.S. Coast Guard Captain Thurlow, sea-savvy native of the Outer Banks, operates independently under the mandate of Navy Secretary Frank Knox, sending back private reports and analyses providing the Secretary with unfiltered information on the successes and failures of the Navy’s mission. The invasion of Tarawa, with which this rouser begins, threatens to be a disaster of the first order. The American strategy of island hopping has brought the fleet to a low-lying string of islands well defended by Japanese troops prepared to fight to the death. The emperor’s forces have prepared earthworks that seem impervious to the Navy’s giant guns, and the day the Marines have picked for invasion is cursed by a tide that will send the invasion craft straight into murderous reefs. Thurlow, seeing that the Marines have no idea what they are getting into, joins the troops and is quickly involved in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. He, his fellow Outer Banksman Bosun Ready O’Neal and a handful of Marines make it out alive, spirited off to the islands of the Far Reaches. They have been rescued by a band of islanders led by Sister Mary Kathleen, who has already escaped the Japanese once and is dead set on going back to settle things with her former captors. When the outriggers land the little fleet on the Far Reaches, it takes no more than a few minutes for them to succumb to the charms of the islands and the islanders. But Sister Mary Kathleen, with whom O’Neal is hopelessly in love, will not let anyone forget her mission to invade the main island where she endured captivity and fell from grace.
Excellent war and, when the guns aren’t firing, equally fine peace.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-33475-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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
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