Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take...
A kind of darkly comic Asian version of Midnight Express, as second-novelist Kneale (the Whitbread-winning English Passengers, 2000) describes a young Englishman trapped in Japan.
Daniel Thayne is your typical middle-class dropout. Shortly after leaving university, Dan decides to chuck England altogether, and eventually ends up in Japan. There, he finds work teaching English at the Vital School, a storefront operation patronized mainly by bored housewives and unmarried girls looking for foreign husbands. The wages are lousy, the students difficult, and Daniel is never paid on time. Why does he stay? Well, he’s lost his passport, for one thing. And he’s started going out with one of his students, for another. His girlfriend Keiko is pouty and immature, fond of Mickey Mouse and stuffed animals, but she’s cute and devoted to Daniel in a shy kind of way. Daniel, for his part, is far from being in love with Keiko, but he has few friends in Tokyo and depends upon her company. When she tells him she’s pregnant, he is shocked but agrees to do the right thing and marry her. Still, he begins to express reluctance when Keiko’s father sets up a wedding on a week’s notice. He becomes even more suspicious when Keiko’s family keeps him virtually locked up in their house in anticipation of the happy day. And he begins to panic outright when it becomes obvious that the family business involves shabby hotels in the bad part of town. It’s one thing to break an engagement—and another to walk out on a mobster’s daughter. Especially when you have no passport, your own parents don’t know where you are, and you don’t have a yen to your name.
Witty, fast-paced fun: a great story (already winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) that keeps the tempo up and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Kneale is out of the gate running.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-297-82899-1
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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