Emmy Awardwinning Hollywood screenwriter Reaves's new and improved fantasy number leaps right over his previous Night Hunter (1995) and Street Magic (1991). Maybe that's because his characters here really take their voodoo seriously. At the prodigal age of 20, Shane LaFitte returns from his travels to his home in Haiti. And although he at first believes Voudoun to be mere charlatanry, he finds himself taken on anyway as a sorcerer's apprentice. Three years later, he's become an accomplished master of white magic phenomena, ``a houngan, the one to whom the townspeople come with their illnesses, their fears and their prayers'' for recovery and redemption. Shane is saved from jail by Jorge Arnez, a beautifully outfitted Cuban refugee who's a far more skilled santero than Shane himself. Their friendship lasts for four years, until Arnez takes up with the black arts. Then both leave Haiti for New Orleans, where Arnez, now known as Mal Sangre, gets going as a pimp. Shane serves six years in the Louisiana State pen for killing his wife Anisse while in a zombie state, induced in him by Mal Sangre. His probation-parole officer, Lia St. Charles, also claims as a client April Delaney, a 19-year-old recovering crack addict and alcoholic streetwalker who's the mother of four-year-old Soukie. Mal Sangre later gets around to kidnapping Soukie for a blood sacrifice to the evil gods. When Shane is set up to be killed by Mal Sangre, he arms himself—but then is busted by Lia for possession of a firearm. So Shane must tunnel his way out of jail, past visions of his dead wife, to prevent the gods from investing Mal Sangre with divine power after his sacrifice of Soukie in Pontchartrain Cemetery. . . . Not bad for those into blood sacrifice.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-85608-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
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
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