Wolf doesn't quite fill the shoes of Jean Auel here, nor does her third prehistoric romance (after The Horsemasters, 1993) strike off in many new directions of its own. At the end of the Pleistocene era, the ``Allerîd'' (a global warming trend) poses a challenge for tribes living on reindeer meat and other game as temperatures rise, glaciers shrink, and the vast herds of reindeer migrate, leaving the people of Europe competing for dwindling food supplies. The tribes in the foothills of the Pyrenees are lucky; reindeer are still plentiful in their area. As traders spread the word, hungry reindeer hunters migrate to make this land their own. The Norakamo and Kindred tribes, both indigenous to the area and both Horsemasters (as opposed to horse eaters), cement their strategic relationship by marrying Nardo, son of the Kindred chief, to fair Alane, daughter of the Norakamo leader. Blonde Alane is a distant cousin to Auel's blonde Ayla- -apparently even at the dawn of history blondes had more fun— though not so big and adventurous (no riding on cave lions). When she goes to live with her husband's tribe, she highlights the differences between her patriarchal people and the matriarchal, Mother-worshipping Kindred. Her attempts at getting Nardo to spend more nights at home threaten her mother-in-law, who fears that the Mother Blood is in danger. In creating a matriarchal society, Wolf shows women a different way of perceiving themselves and their potential importance in society. She also invents new words (``da'' for ``yes,'' ``na'' for ``no,'' the all-purpose exclamation ``dhu'') and provides the usual stilted ``primitive'' language: ``Alane tried to raise her knee so that she could get him in a place where it would hurt.'' Wolf's anthropological fantasy is always interesting, but it gets weighted down in plot and explanation. A horse and reindeer show that never hits its stride. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93848-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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