A well-written, thoughtful debut with wide crossover potential. Inclán never condescends and never judges, preferring to let...
A 17-year-old high-schooler gives birth, with no one to help but her even younger sister: the first in NAL’s new line of women’s fiction.
No one seems to notice the pregnancy—not Kate Phillips’s teachers and certainly not her father Davis, who spends most of his free time with his girlfriend Hannah and her two young boys, stopping by his old house only occasionally. Seeing his own teenaged daughters only reminds Davis of their mother, Deirdre, a vibrant, much-loved, much-missed woman who recently died of breast cancer. His wife’s friends have given up asking after Kate and Tyler, despite their concerns—not that Kate minds. She’s never been the talkative type, and her cheerleader sister Tyler, 15, has been sworn to secrecy. The girls prepare for everything, combing through thrift stores and resale shops to provide a layette for the baby Kate is determined to deliver at home, without a doctor or midwife. They also study birthing books and videos, although the possibility of complications makes Tyler increasingly uneasy. But together the two manage to bring the baby into the world despite many hours of difficult labor. The exhausted young mother nurses her newborn daughter, whom she names Deirdre, and the sisters get her settled in an improvised nursery they’ve set up in a closet. Meanwhile, they attend school in shifts, rarely leaving the baby alone for more than an hour at a time. But the infant’s crying gives the girls away at last. Kate and Tyler are immediately placed in foster care, the baby is taken away (temporarily), and their father is forced to defend himself on charges of abandonment.
A well-written, thoughtful debut with wide crossover potential. Inclán never condescends and never judges, preferring to let her subtly drawn people speak for themselves. The understanding portrayal of her teenaged heroines—stubborn, careless, and fiercely honest—is remarkably astute.Pub Date: May 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-451-20282-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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