A glimpse into the life of a reluctant sex worker, featuring a sympathetic, if occasionally bland, heroine.
Debut author Jordan offers a fictionalized account of a young woman’s real-life experiences with crime and prostitution in Bulgaria.
Ionna never had a very peaceful childhood: “My father was particularly inventive in his punishments and in his beatings had no equal.” She ran away from home after suffering “things that would make your hair stand on end,” and eventually falls in with a young criminal named Krasi and his gang of miscreants. They steal from foreigners in seaside resorts, and their operation is small but very successful. However, the waves of excitement and spending come to an abrupt standstill when Krasi kills someone and must flee the country. After refusing to go with him, Ionna is left with limited money and a broken heart. She eventually finds herself part of a sex trafficking ring and becomes a prostitute in an upscale hotel catering to wealthy, foreign men. Her work is often painful and grotesque (“Even the memory of what that pervert did to me makes me feel ashamed”). How will Ionna survive such an existence? Jordan provides insight into the types of traps that might face a girl like Ionna, but although the young woman’s actions are clear, much of her interior life remains opaque. Occasional flashes of personality offer captivating details (such as when Ionna encounters a videocassette recorder: “…soon the film was beginning. It was called ‘Ghost’, a marvellous story about love, death and human morality”), but she can feel, at times, like any other girl stuck in hard times. A more complex picture of her inner life might have resulted in a more memorable portrait. However, Ionna’s constant will to survive leaves readers with a sense of understanding. If nothing else, the book succeeds in illuminating a broad picture of shady dealings and the people swept up in them.
A glimpse into the life of a reluctant sex worker, featuring a sympathetic, if occasionally bland, heroine.Pub Date: June 13, 2014
ISBN: B00LK2SGEE
Page Count: 215
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
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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