A sad tale told with an admirable lack of sentimentality.
A civil war in Beirut separates a family that’s already emotionally fractured in this novel.
In 1976, Finlay Fortin lives in Beirut with wife, Mo, and his 15-year-old daughter, Anouk. Ever since “the troubles” began—the eruption of internecine war—it’s been a downward spiral into civil chaos. Photojournalist Mo’s boss disappeared and is presumed dead. Explosions of bombs regularly rattle the streets. However, Mo recklessly courts danger to score a sellable photograph, and Finlay worries that Anouk is becoming dangerously inured to the threats around her. One day, Anouk and a boy that she likes, Danny Delacruz, take the family car and go exploring on a beach just outside the perimeter of safety; soon, Danny is kidnapped and the car stolen. Finlay decides to quit his job and move his family to the French countryside; his French-born father left him a house there as part of an inheritance. Mo has no intention of exchanging professional opportunities for a bucolic landscape, but she disingenuously promises to follow the other two soon. Anouk, meanwhile, is livid, uninterested in leaving the place that she thinks of as home and fearful that she’s abandoning the missing Danny, who she hopes is still alive. Finlay, meanwhile, soon falls for a local widow and contemplates becoming a full-time baker. But his brief peace is punctured by two pieces of tragic news. Grant (The Burning Veil, 2010), in straightforward, often melancholy prose, masterfully juxtaposes a nation’s disintegration with a family’s, showing that, in both cases, the seeds of destruction were planted long ago. When Finlay first moves to Beirut, for instance, Grant shows how they feel safe and solid as a family, but as the political situation worsens, he effectively describes its effect on each character: Mo becomes happier, Anouk becomes desensitized, and Finlay becomes obsessed with leaving. Mo is painted in terms so severe that it’s very hard to have any sympathy for her—she dismisses her parental responsibilities, for example, with a perverse pride. But both Finlay and Anouk—as well as Finlay’s paramour, Colette—are limned with graceful nuance and sensitivity.
A sad tale told with an admirable lack of sentimentality.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9825074-4-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Mish Mish Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
