An overlong but effective indictment of the evils of violence against children.
After surviving horrific violence at a young age, a woman dedicates her life to preventing child abuse in Bassler’s debut novel.
When 7-year-old Cindy is brutally beaten by her stepfather, her injuries are so severe her doctor likens them to those he’s seen from “high-speed car accidents.” After several months of rehabilitative therapy, Cindy relearns how to walk and talk, but the abuse has changed her life forever. Although she has a resilient spirit, the support of caring doctors and loving foster parents to help her overcome her trauma, she doesn’t forget what happened to her. As an adult, she dedicates herself to helping other abused children as a social-services caseworker. She does save some kids from violence, but her failures haunt her—particularly one involving young Brittany, who was murdered by her father. Cindy resolves that the best way to stop severe child abuse is to run for office, with a goal of making child abuse a federal crime. The Green Party supports her candidacy for U.S. Senate, and after an unlikely plot twist, Cindy wins the election. She outmaneuvers cynical Senate power players through luck and force of will, and eventually sees her sweeping child-abuse legislation passed. She then personally lobbies the president to sign the bill into law, arguing that doing so will allow him to “write [his] name in the history books.” Bassler’s accounts of child abuse are appropriately brutal, and include horrifying, clinical descriptions of children’s injuries (“her head snapped back, cracking the vertebrae and severing her spinal cord”), as well as child-abuse statistics (“an estimated 906,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect last year”). However, although Cindy’s quest to stop abuse is a noble one, she never quite emerges as a three-dimensional character; indeed, her only distinguishing qualities are her childhood trauma and her saintly devotion to her cause. The novel, at more than 700 pages, is also swollen with extraneous details and characters, such as Cindy’s kind, supportive boyfriend Frank, who is unceremoniously dumped when she decides to run for the Senate. Readers who persevere, however, will likely enjoy this story about child abuse and survival.
An overlong but effective indictment of the evils of violence against children.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615671659
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Herald Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2013
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
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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