A Treasure Island for the modern era, recommended for middle-grade readers and fans of pirate-adventure tales.
In Karayaka’s debut novel, a young boy finds a father figure in a mysterious old fisherman, starting him on a swashbuckling quest on the high seas.
Levend and Orion, two old friends, return to Levend’s hometown ahead of a party scheduled for the following day. Both men recognize an old boat on the docks, and when a group of local boys ask how the men know the vessel, Levend begins to tell a tale about when he was 14 and confided in an older fisherman calling himself “Mr. Ben Ice.” Levend grew to trust Mr. Ice, who was missing an eye, a hand, and a leg, and followed him out to sea on a search for fish. However, young Levend quickly realized that Mr. Ice had a sinister history and that his own life was now at risk. The boys listen to Levend’s story with bated breath, and after Orion reveals his connection to the tale, they enjoy a drama replete with pirates, secret elixirs, combat, and betrayal. At the center of all of it is the mystery of who Mr. Ice really was. And what of Benice, the wife whom he longed for? Karayaka’s novel is an occasionally violent page-turner that sometimes rewinds the action to allow different narrators to fill in events from alternate perspectives. As a result, it features three different time periods and a plethora of plot twists. However, the aforementioned violence is understated, and the narration keeps all the details clear and concise, making it suitable for younger readers. The writing style is reminiscent of the prose in the 1993 English translation of Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist, featuring turns of phrase that offer nuggets of wisdom. Eason’s (The Gobblings, 2017) illustrations at the start of each chapter are done in a classical style, reminiscent of boys’ adventure books from the 1950s and ’60s, and use a light color palette to evoke a sense of mysticism. It all comes to a touching conclusion, and readers are left with a lasting moral.
A Treasure Island for the modern era, recommended for middle-grade readers and fans of pirate-adventure tales.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9989640-4-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Yunka Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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