An enjoyable story of teen independence and exploration.
In Scalzo’s debut novel, a teenager skips a STEM competition to pursue her own interests.
Fifteen-year-old Julia Bissette is an aficionado of fractals (“You can draw a circle with geometry, but you can draw a snowflake with fractal geometry”). She’d initially planned to go to a national conference that awards a monetary prize to the best fractal diagram produced by one of its young entrants. Instead, she spends a Holden Caulfield–esque week exploring her hometown of Washington, D.C., on her own terms. She uses her father’s credit card to check into the Hay-Adams Hotel, and at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Julia meets Kal Kovac, a tall teenage boy trying to solve the mystery of why his grandfather never returned from the war. Julia and Kal hit it off, and they team up to investigate his relative’s past—a journey that takes them to the National Archives, CIA headquarters, and, eventually, to the very competition that Julia’s been avoiding. The present-day chapters are intercut with excerpts from Kal’s grandfather’s journal, including an account of his work during secret missions in Laos, and both narratives reach their resolutions in the book’s closing pages. Julia is a compelling protagonist who’s both self-aware and self-indulgent (“I guess I might be in trouble, but for what?”). Indeed, readers may have trouble deciding whether they want to root for her or shake some sense into her. Her relationship with Kal is refreshing, as it doesn’t instantly transform into a romance; they’re strangers united by a cause rather than sudden soul mates. Scalzo knows her District of Columbia setting well, and she develops it in detail throughout the story, allowing both Julia and the reader to become reacquainted with a familiar place. The prose is strong—quiet but evocative—and it does an excellent job of capturing the unanswered questions that drive Julia and Kal: “His isn’t a war story I understand from school and field trips, a Civil War soldier breathing his last breath, Walt Whitman holding his hand at the Patent Office, not even a mile from the White House and President Lincoln himself.”
An enjoyable story of teen independence and exploration.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73269-400-2
Page Count: 206
Publisher: One One Two Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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