A comforting and moving character-driven tale.
Lenfestey (A Mother's Conviction, 2015, etc.) offers readers a charming novel about family.
Claire Tillman’s life is falling apart. Couples counseling isn’t working, and her husband of 12 years, Ben, is ready to throw in the towel on their relationship. She quickly finds herself feeling like she has little to hold onto in life aside from the fulfillment she finds in her job as a high school social-studies teacher: “My students are my kids.” But when she finds Jaxon, one of those students, sleeping in his car, she’s truly spurred to action for the first time in years. The emotional core of the story is strong, and the prose is solid, with a dependable flow that allows the characters and their feelings to take center stage. Jaxon has grown up without a father, but now that he’s graduating high school and heading to college, he wants to meet his missing parent; he’s so fervent in this wish, in fact, that it’s caused conflict with his mom, who’s kicked him out of the house. Claire helps Jaxon in his search, and the two develop a real friendship. Meanwhile, she finds herself questioning her memories of her own father, who supposedly died in a car accident when she was young. The story strongly explores how personal history is never as simple as it first appears, and as it progresses, new perspectives—such as that of Jaxon’s possible father, who’s struggling with a loss of his own; and that of Hope, Claire’s half sister—complicate the main characters’ needs and wants. Ultimately, this is a story about relationships, and the author deftly balances disparate personalities, particularly in dialogue. What’s more, the message that the answers to people’s problems lie in human connection feels genuine. The characters’ lives may not be turning out as they planned, but that makes their journey toward solace all the more satisfying.
A comforting and moving character-driven tale.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5370-6549-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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