A quiet, meditative tale about devotion in its many forms.
A reserved second outing by Yoshikawa (One Hundred and One Ways, 1999), filled with regret and recriminations, about two stepsisters reunited.
After a 17-year-long separation and silence, Claudia is both overjoyed and troubled when stepsister Rei contacts her. Rei is moving to Boston, so the two will be together again, but Claudia wants to know why Rei disappeared in the first place. When Claudia was nine, her kind but plodding father Henry shocked everyone by quickly divorcing Claudia’s mother to marry Hana, a Japanese widow he met at the hardware store. Claudia (who spent weekends with her father’s new family) and Rei became sisters in the truest sense of the word, thinking of each other as twins, wondering how anyone could tell them apart. Though she hated Hana for dissolving her family (and still does), Claudia was spellbound by the stories Rei told, fairy tales involving Hana and the crown prince of Japan, about Hana the dedicated young artist, about Hana and America. Now that Rei is back, cagey and unwilling to talk about the skin cancer that nearly killed her, Claudia is revisited by images of Hana. Always fascinated by the woman who stole her father, Claudia feels she is now truly her stepmother’s child since she herself is having an affair with a married man. Claudia and Vikram have been devoted to each other for the past two years, but his traditional family won’t allow for divorce, especially with his two children so young. The irony is not lost on Claudia, but her intractable dislike for Hana remains. Though a bit splintered in its focus, the final revelations—why Hana abandoned Henry after eight years of blissful marriage, why Hana became obsessed with painting mushrooms, why Hana eventually takes all responsibility for Rei’s cancer—serve less as compulsory climax than as simple extensions of the stories Rei has been telling Claudia all their lives about the mysterious and unknowable Hana.
A quiet, meditative tale about devotion in its many forms.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80155-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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