An emotionally satisfying story of two college students finding love amid chaos.
A sequel offers an ongoing melodrama set on a university campus.
Poole’s (Don’t Let Me Fall, 2013) new novel in her Village series brings back several characters from her earlier installment, notably college sophomore Ciara Capers, a smart and emotionally brave young woman returning to Aurbor Grove University after her adventures in the first book. AGU star quarterback Xander Oliver reappears as well. A sensitive “preacher’s kid,” Xander tries not to become ensnared in the typical partying ways of college (he remembers his religious upbringing often, with its calls for “a clean head, a clean heart, and clean hands”). Ciara rooms with her best friend, Faraji, and an archly competitive young woman named Brooklyn, with whom she often clashes. Mixed into this tense combination are romantic entanglements: Ciara’s clingy ex-boyfriend Trey continues to show up on her cellphone, for instance (“It’s a never-ending saga with him,” she tells Brooklyn. “Every time he calls or texts me, I have to relive all my mistakes”). And while Faraji’s boyfriend, Nick, provides her with a steady source of emotional support, he also delivers some complications, since he and Ciara earlier had a brief fling they’ve decided to keep a secret from Faraji. In steady and well-controlled dramatic advancements, Poole shapes the events of her story to bring Ciara and Xander closer together despite the schemes of Brooklyn and the boorish antics of Xander’s squad mates. Most memorably, the author creates a richly believable atmosphere of college life—the parties, the academic pressures, the swings between tedium and debauchery, the struggles of students to forge their own identities as they move into adulthood, the emotional baggage of ex-lovers and new attachments, etc. (Poole also refreshingly works in an element of real-world, old-fashioned financial concerns, an aspect usually left out of campus fiction.) The action of the book takes place independently from its predecessor, although the two novels are best read in sequence; together, they present a warmly convincing tale of 21st-century university life.
An emotionally satisfying story of two college students finding love amid chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9910708-1-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Jack of All Trades Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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