Min evokes period and place as well as characters with stringent attention and honesty.
In Min’s troubling yet lovely debut, a Korean-American burn victim circa 1976 tries to make sense of the house fire that killed her parents.
While recovering from burns over 30% of her body, 18-year-old Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa for short—looks back on her life and the life of her parents to understand why one of them set the fatal fire the night before Isa was to graduate from high school. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor in Albany, had always seemed cold and remote. Her docile mother, a beautiful former ballerina lightly scarred from a fire in her own childhood, had returned to college to study poetry. Isa, an only child since her younger brother died in a tragic accident, rejected much of her parents’ Korean culture and rebelled against her father’s authoritarian rules. Ambivalent about standing out, she wanted to be fully American. She spent more and more time at her friend Rachel’s house, drawn as much by Rachel’s messy but relaxed parents as by Rachel. Isa became romantically involved with another outsider at school, Hero, a blind Albino who imagined himself the next Johnny Winter. After his parents threatened to send him to a special school for the visually impaired, Hero convinced Isa and Rachel to run away with him to California. The three shared a moment of sexual experimentation that titillated yet frightened them before they were apprehended and brought home, their relationships shattered. Still distraught at losing Hero, Isa caught her mother kissing her poetry professor. She told her father, who was, of course, crushed. After the fire, Isa assumes her father’s responsibility until she reads his journal, which makes clear that he was incapable of such violence. Isa recognizes that her mother set the fire, but realizes that placing guilt matters less than appreciating her own survival. Isa’s parents remain cloudy but powerful mysteries.
Min evokes period and place as well as characters with stringent attention and honesty.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26344-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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