An exhilarating and emotionally astute mystery.
When a popular high school teacher suddenly vanishes, a pack of his most devoted former students starts looking for him in this debut novel.
Bob Fiske is a legendary high school English teacher and football coach at Evanston Township High in Michigan who’s known for his undying dedication to his students. He regularly compiles an unofficial list of “Winners,” a roster meant both to recognize students for their talents and inspire underachievers to fulfill their unrealized promise. Then Fiske mysteriously disappears, raising suspicions of foul play. Some admiring past Winners are so distraught they organize their own search party, prepared to put their lives on hold until they track him down, their loyalty to Fiske affectingly depicted by Bond. The group doesn’t have much time. Principal Mancini and Fiske have long been bitter rivals—the teacher is infamous for his confrontational demeanor. Mancini gives the band 24 hours to find Fiske before he’s terminated from his job for dereliction of duty. The team of faithful former students is led by Stephanie “Steph” Reece, who was one of Fiske’s brightest pupils. She is haunted by guilt that she squandered his support by falling short of her extraordinary potential. She’s especially attached to Fiske since he became something of a substitute for her own father, who died of cancer when she was only 3 years old. There’s a break in the case when another past Winner—Eric Pinkersby, an astonishingly successful tech entrepreneur—discovers that Fiske has been exchanging texts regularly with Autumn Brockert, a 16-year-old student of his. And when she too goes missing, the police suspect he abducted her, though Steph simply can’t accept that her idol is a craven predator. Bond collapses two distinct literary genres into one seamless novelistic whole: a mystery and an emotional drama. While the past Winners hunt down clues in order to find Fiske, they’re forced to confront the memories of their high school selves and the extent to which their adult lives are either a consummation or betrayal of their youthful talents. And Fiske is deliciously enigmatic—though almost heroically supportive of his students, he seems to harbor a dark past, filled with rueful remorse. The author subtly captures Fiske’s complexity as well as his penchant for profoundly stirring inspiration: “Stephanie, time is our mortal enemy. Time leeches ambition. Never forget that greatness lives inside you. No matter how far off course you stray—no matter what you’ve done or have to atone for in the past—greatness remains. Greatness is never beyond salvage.” But the plot becomes increasingly convoluted and implausible and exchanges the dramatic nuance that typified the beginning for operatic melodrama. Yet Bond is so ingeniously inventive—he consistently moves the story in wholly unpredictable directions—that it’s likely readers will forgive these real but minor fictional vices. The novel’s central mystery is thrilling, but the true spine of the tale is the fragile connections between the past Winners, who must not only investigate Fiske’s disappearance, but also the authenticity of their lives and friendships.
An exhilarating and emotionally astute mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73225-520-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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