A human, humane, and uplifting story.
Witucki offers a bittersweet novel about a friendship between two blind people of different ages.
Middle school student Tallie Keller has been blind since birth and feels constantly frustrated and upset with her family, her schooling, and her life in general. Then she becomes acquainted with a middle-aged librarian, Benjamin Brown, who was born with sight but lost his vision over time. They meet when Tallie calls him for library assistance and they start a conversation that extends over multiple calls. Tallie, who’s white, feels hemmed in by the limitations that blindness puts on her already difficult middle school life; Benjamin, an African-American, has lived a long and painful existence, facing social prejudices against his race and his disability, as well as poverty and other personal tragedies. An extraordinary year of learning and friendship ensues for them both, as Benjamin helps Tallie to accept both her sightlessness and her potential. Overall, Witucki’s characters are three-dimensional and warm, but the story never feels sappy or sentimental. (The on-the-nose quality of a blind character’s last name being Keller is impossible to ignore, but it doesn’t harm the narrative.) Witucki’s central themes of accepting one’s limitations without capitulating to them, the possibility of two people striking up a friendship despite their differences, and the ways in which fear limits possibilities in life are compelling. The dialogue is clear and believable throughout, and the novel’s alternating points of view feel both conversational and tightly structured. The story expresses aspects of blind living that may be unfamiliar to many, and as Tallie learns to step outside herself, so will readers.
A human, humane, and uplifting story.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942545-99-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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