Despite Janey’s self-important mini-lectures tying her story to narrative theory, Frankel offers no more than a shallow,...
Frankel explores the boundaries of family in her first novel, about three young women in Seattle who share the experience of motherhood when one becomes pregnant.
Narrator Janey, a nice Jewish girl from Canada, meets vegetarian Jill and devoutly Mormon Katie while they are all grad students in English lit. When Jill becomes pregnant, she realizes she wants to keep the baby, but her much younger boyfriend Dan, who is only now about to graduate from college, balks. So Janey and Katie happily agree to help Jill raise the baby, and all move in together. Soon baby Atlas arrives. The girls set up a complicated schedule of childcare, teaching and preparing for their dissertations. Janey’s solipsistic account of their travails may not sound very difficult or dramatic to anyone who has actually been a mother and/or held a job. Janey cooks, Jill cleans, Katie shops. Their happily coupled gay friends Jason and Lucas become adjunct members of the extended family—Katie loves them even if her religion doesn’t—along with Jill’s loving single mother Diane and Janey’s even more loving parents and grandmother. Katie has a couple of dates with a charming history grad student named Ethan, but he won’t convert to Mormonism. Not to worry. Soon she meets 21-year-old Mormon Peter (no surprise that these remarkably innocent girls like younger men) and becomes engaged within a week, while the growing friendship between Janey and Ethan vibrates with definite romantic tension—although sex in this novel is of the kissy/cuddly variety and Janey has no personality. Then Dan reappears in Jill’s life and things fall apart. Atlas ends up in the emergency room. Janey and Jill have a major falling out, and Jill moves with Atlas to Dan’s. Has the shared mothering experiment failed? The death of Janey’s grandmother, while sad, unites friends and lovers. After all, everyone’s intentions are good.
Despite Janey’s self-important mini-lectures tying her story to narrative theory, Frankel offers no more than a shallow, feel-good weepy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59538-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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