A young girl abandoned by her mother struggles to discover her origins in Denver's early-'70s hippie scene in a compelling coming- of-age debut. Five-year-old Sarajean Henry has a home and a father of sorts, but her life in downtown Denver in 1969 is decidedly exotic. Though she doesn't know it, the man she lives with isn't actually her father, and the woman who crashes occasionally in the purple-walled apartment downstairs is really her mother, but the hippie world she grows up in—a community of refugees from the conservative Midwest- -is conspiring to keep the truth of her origins from her. As Sarajean matures and reaches adolescence, she finds herself drifting from one funky apartment to another, searching for a mother's tenderness (though unable even to identify her yearning) in a cup of herbal tea with Lady Jane, a Joni Mitchelllike space cadet in embroidered jeans and wooden clogs; a friendship (and a part-time job) with the grandmotherly owner of the local thrift shop; poetry sessions with the elusive, stoned-out Tina Blue, who confides to Sarajean that she has ``fled the dark heart of America'' and is hiding; and increasingly risky escapades with Lalena, Sarajean's best friend, whose sexual abuse by her Vietnam- vet, drug-pushing father epitomizes the community's casual irresponsibility toward their young. Jimmy Henry, Sarajean's own burnt-out surrogate father, is too caught up in his heroin addiction and subsequent recovery to realize that Sarajean needs to know who her mother is. He clearly needs Sarajean, though, for stability in his life, and it's his imperfect love that saves the girl when she flees across America, seeking her mother and a stable identity for herself. An extraordinarily powerful first novel in which what is not said often seems infinitely more important than what is. Sarajean is impossible to forget. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 31, 1997
ISBN: 1-56512-154-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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