A solidly researched, artfully written novel that’s both entertaining and educational.
Walker’s (Romar Jones Takes a Hike, 2012, etc.) Depression-era novel offers a microcosm of small-town 1930s America.
The tale opens in November 1932 as the citizens of Burke Bay, on the banks of Washington state’s Puget Sound, prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving. Seeking work and a chance to cash in on the area’s lucrative distilleries, a dapper Farley Price arrives in his fancy automobile with his timid wife, Eleanor, and their young daughter, Hannah. They’re soon welcomed by the well-respected Helmer and Ebbe Persson, who hire Farley to harvest turkeys. But when Price’s violent drunkenness and underhanded business plans threaten the community’s stability, Burke Bay residents rally to protect Eleanor and Hannah. Several subplots add dimension to the main story, including schoolteacher Maeva Swanson’s rocky relationship with longtime beau Axel Jenson as she bucks tradition and asserts her independence. Third-generation distiller Orval Blevins, in particular, is a truly memorable character; Walker deftly reveals his story as Blevins struggles to balance his desire to continue his family’s traditional livelihood with his wife’s demands that he adjust to the post-Prohibition marketplace and devise a suitable business for their son, Theodore, to inherit. A quirky pair of bachelor brothers, Hauk and Lang Nordlund, around whom two love triangles develop, help bring the story to its resolution. The close-knit Scandinavian community of Burke Bay could be nearly any ethnic enclave facing the challenges of prolonged unemployment, economic uncertainty, and intergenerational conflict and acculturation. But Walker’s characters and keen observations bring the town alive, leaving readers with a deep understanding of the people and the challenges they faced during a tumultuous era. The author also intriguingly shows how the production and consumption of alcohol influences individual people, families and the community at large.
A solidly researched, artfully written novel that’s both entertaining and educational.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0984840052
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Plicata Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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