An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.
A sequel focuses on a gay student coming into his own in early 1980s Detroit.
After an adolescence filled with fear and self-loathing, Jamie Goldberg has finally decided to come out of the closet. The college student chooses to do so the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1980 in the kitchen of his parents’ home in Northwest Detroit. “There,” narrates Jamie ruefully, “homosexuality scored another decisive yet Pyrrhic victory.” Despite his mother’s lifetime of involvement in progressive politics, she reacts with anger and disgust. His father asks him to leave, telling him, “Don’t come back until you’re cured.” Now that his parents are no longer paying for school, Jamie switches to his preferred major, theater, and throws himself into the work. He begins to experiment with his newfound freedom, but he still has concerns with the way others perceive him as well as learning hard lessons about love and sex. Jamie begins to develop a reputation for promiscuity after an incident involving his crush, Casper Tyres, and he starts to explore—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—the world of cruising. In certain bathrooms and parks, with acquaintances and strangers, Jamie finally becomes intimate with the peculiar and often frightening world of male sexuality. It’s made all the more difficult by the fact that he still has not yet reckoned with the act that initiated his sexual life: the rape he suffered as a young boy. As Jamie’s sex life quickly escalates to new heights, he realizes that he hasn’t found himself by coming out of the closet. In order to realize who the real Jamie Goldberg is, he still has a lot of work to do.
Taylor’s prose is smooth and often striking, creating memorable images that will stick in readers’ minds as much as they do in that of the impressionable Jamie: “We got in this old boat-like white Cadillac and drove down Woodward. Detroit, that late at night, resembled a demilitarized zone after curfew. Stores with thick metal bars; offices with small if any windows, protected by iron rails; and the occasional empty burned-out lot left exactly as it was after the 1968 riots.” The author skillfully portrays Jamie’s claustrophobic sense of himself in the world, beset on one side by the homophobia that constantly threatens his well-being and on the other by the lusts of men who do not have his best interests at heart. Between this rock and a hard place, Jamie festers in a stew of confusion and self-disgust. The book has a narrower time frame than the previous volume in the series, covering only a six-month period from 1980 to ’81. While the condensed period helps make the tale more palatable, there is still just too much of it. At over 400 pages,the book is bloated by superfluous scenes and redundant episodes, feeling more diaristic than novelistic on occasion. Taylor succeeds in capturing a time and place in Jamie’s life, but the story would likely have had a greater impact if the author had managed to show less of it.
An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73429-570-2
Page Count: 414
Publisher: ArnoLand Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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