A captivating and powerfully related account of Jesus’ early years.
A debut historical novel imagines Jesus’ youthful desire for spiritual enlightenment.
As a young boy in Galilee, Yeshua is precociously interested in religious study and implacably desires to devote his life to it. And while he is obedient to the laws of his faith, he’s also disturbed by their apparent contradictions and exclusion of many from God’s protective love. His father, however, interprets his philosophical curiosity as impudence and his aspirations as fanciful fits of vanity; he is a carpenter, and Yeshua is destined to become one as well. Zoroastrian seers prophesize that Yeshua is the Messiah, a prediction that stirs the boy. But his father dismisses the claim and arranges for Yeshua to marry for the good of the whole family. Then Yeshua meets Dhiman, a Buddhist monk who tells him that in his religious tradition, anyone can become a monk regardless of the circumstances of birth, and the boy runs off with him to study. But though he learns much, he is also stymied by monastic rules and is eventually forced to leave. He finds a new guru, Kahanji, who teaches him about Krishna. Again, Yeshua deepens his spiritual practice but rejects the caste system that aristocratically elevates some over others in the eyes of God. Yeshua finally returns home to his family and begins the ministry for which he becomes famous and which is viewed by the Roman authorities as politically seditious in intent. Duarte ambitiously conjures the undocumented years of Jesus’ life, before he became a historically transformative figure. The author’s knowledge of the period is remarkably astute, and she artfully concocts a less self-possessed Jesus, still grasping for a sense of his life’s mission. She also delves into his youthful worldly longings and the romantic experiences he has before his ministry, realistically fleshing out the possible details of his mortal life. Duarte masterfully traces the evolution of Jesus’ thought and the grand synthesis of religious traditions it culminates in: “I aim to remind my brother and sisters to love God and one another. Because it’s what’s in your heart that makes you righteous or impure.”
A captivating and powerfully related account of Jesus’ early years.Pub Date: July 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971807-0-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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