Weighty with nervous fears detailed at length, yet gripping all the way.
Fast and literate suspense by an ex-con and former narc (The Catch, 1998, etc.).
Wozencraft’s life experiences stand in well for her story about 24-year-old female cop Diane Wellman, in Bolton, Texas, who is falsely accused of cocaine possession and sentenced to a federal prison where she bunks with Gail Rubin, who has been in for 20 years, just watched her parole interview go south, and has 12 more years to go. She too was falsely accused of being part of an aggressive civil-rights team’s successful bank robbery that caused two deaths. When arrested, she’d also supposedly been in possession of a cellar full of firearms and explosives. As a cop, Diane had come upon a triple murder in the woods and seen the white murderer as he fled. The police chief, however, jails a black perp, who lands on death row. To shut Diane up, the chief has her doped with knockout drops, plants cocaine in her fridge, and alerts the DEA to arrest her. At first, Diane just wants to serve her ten years, but when Gail prepares for a jailbreak Diane decides to go along, head back for Bolton, and find some transcripts that will exonerate her and free the perp on death row. The two women manage their escape but find that, as they flee, life on the outside is far more harrowing than life in a cell. Both turn paranoid about pursuit and the cop that may walk up to them at any moment and send them back to jail. They thumb a ride to Manhattan, pick up Gail’s family money, get fancy hair styling and bright garb, entrain to Chicago, then separate and meet up in Oklahoma City. Although the suspense remains heavy, the larger subject is the mental state of being prison-breakers wanted in a nationwide manhunt. The two plan to fly to France—but first Diane must clear her name.
Weighty with nervous fears detailed at length, yet gripping all the way.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28959-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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