A balance of suspense and science makes for a memorable ghost tale.
Exploring the dark history of America’s eugenics movement, Picoult (Perfect Match, 2002, etc.) sneaks in a ghost story in her eighth outing: a gratifying blend of gothic melodrama and social critique.
Ross Wakeman remains implausibly unscathed after every suicide attempt, preventing him from a desired reunion with his dead fiancée. Having quit his job filming for a television ghost hunter, he takes refuge at his sister Shelby’s in small-town Vermont, where, as luck would have it, his expertise as a ghost hunter is needed: Dying Spencer Pike has finally agreed to sell his house, but now that a developer is ready to build a strip mall, the local Abenaki tribe is claiming the land as a burial ground. The Abenaki protestors, including 102-year-old Az Thompson, have no evidence for their claim, but the developer hires Ross to see whether there really is anything to the strange goings-on in town: rose petals falling from the sky, cars driving only in reverse, robins’ eggs found under pillows, pennies minted in 1931 landing in everyone’s pockets. Ross meets Lia in his investigation, a strange young woman he begins to fall for until he realizes she’s none other than Cecilia Pike, Spencer’s young bride, murdered in 1931. Things shift temporarily to Lia’s story and the tragic account of American eugenics. A young Spencer Pike spearheaded the cleansing of his town, sterilizing the local “gypsies,” the Abenaki, unable to acknowledge how close his own pregnant wife (suicidal and a half-breed) is to those he’s trying to erase. In the present again, Shelby falls in love with the town cop, who is also newly interested in the old case; Shelby’s son Ethan, suffering from a rare genetic disease, begins to test the bounds of his mortality; Meredith, a genetic counselor, is frantic about her daughter’s seeing ghosts; Ross believes Meredith and Lia to be one and the same; and old Az Thompson seems to be holding the key to everything.
A balance of suspense and science makes for a memorable ghost tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5450-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
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