The Virgin Mary goes to bat for a Spanish rancher of fighting bulls while a Gypsy fortune-teller summons what dark forces she can on behalf of her cowardly matador brother—in this rather pallid little fable-cum-novella from the many-volumed Michener. There was a time when the Mota family raised fighting bulls among the finest in Spain—and fate, now, has given the aging Don Cayetano Mota a last chance to bring glory back by showing that his ranch can once again fulfill his family's old dream of breeding great "[bulls] of honor who will pull no surprises in the ring." Trouble brews, though, in the form of the bad-charactered matador Lzaro Lopez, whose cowardice often makes even the best of bulls look undistinguished—and who has long held a grudging and suspicious animosity toward Don Cayetano and the Mota bulls. Everything rides on how well the animals will fight in the great Eastertime festival in Seville, and while Don Cayetano does acts of public penance and fervently offers prayers to the Virgin, the erratic and cowardly Lzaro grows only more suspicious—until he accuses Don Cayetano of having "bewitched" his bulls: "'I've discovered your secret, you agent of the devil. You'll not kill me with your witchcraft bulls. Not me!'" And so who, if anyone, will die? And will the bulls be brave? The story is told by an American writer who befriends Don Cayetano; learns much about bullfighting and bulls; hears and sees miracles (the Virgin moves, glows, and speaks); and who even meets the fortune-teller Magdalena Lopez, Lzaro's dark and smolderingly beautiful sister, who reveals that once the Mota bulls enter the ring, what will happen is... But heaven forfend the telling, except that, yes, there will be both life and death, honor and indignity. Slight, short, harmless, effortless, sometimes informative, and bland.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41822-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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