A charmingly perceptive follow-up that should appeal to both teenagers and adults.
This sequel to Luddy’s debut novel (Spelldown, 2008) continues the story of a young woman dealing with family, first love and the urge to escape her small South Carolina hometown in the early 1970s.
Seventeen-year-old Karlene Bridges can’t wait to get out of Red Clover. Her high school career is almost over, and she has a good shot at scholarships at several colleges, including Smith, the alma mater of her mentor and confidante, Mrs. Harrison. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harrison and her family are about to leave town. She’s not the only one leaving: Karlene’s love interest, Billy Ray Jenkins, is off serving in the Navy, and her other male friend, Spencer Randall, who she notices is looking mighty handsome lately, was just drafted. In fact, all the other boys in Red Clover are about to go off to Vietnam or have already died there. Karlene’s only respite from her loneliness lies in the idea of getting out of Red Clover. As a girl bordering on adulthood, she explores the ideas of sex and sexuality while following a deeply feminist philosophy. She’s happy that her older sister is experiencing her first pregnancy, but privately she thinks, “[y]ou’d think Gloria Jean was incubating the New Messiah, the way she and Mama go on about it.” And although her friends, such as Spencer’s sister, Lucinda, eagerly delve into romantic encounters, Karlene realizes the importance of protecting herself from an early or unplanned pregnancy; she takes to heart Mrs. Harrison’s admonition that “making love is dangerous for a woman, more so than for a man.” References to popular music, films and events of the time help illustrate the story’s themes, although younger readers may not immediately recognize them all. Luddy’s quick-witted, perceptive dialogue (“Sometimes lyrics brood in my heart. Sometimes they pop into my brain, but this one started in my epidermis”) breathes life into Karlene’s precocious personality. Anyone who’s experienced the restlessness of young adulthood will identify with Karlene’s yearning to leave her small town behind. However, Red Clover also seems to be the kind of place to which Karlene will happily return someday. Fans of Luddy’s first novel will be glad to have that opportunity here.
A charmingly perceptive follow-up that should appeal to both teenagers and adults.Pub Date: April 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991551804
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Backbone Books
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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