In this moving and magical literary journey, a heroine grapples with a terrifying power.
A young girl gains the ability to see the death of anyone she touches in this debut “modern(ish)” fairy tale.
Waking on her 13th birthday, Lily kisses her father good morning and is struck by a vision of how he will drown that very day. Frightened by this new talent, which seems to have come to her just as her body is beginning to change into that of a woman, Lily feels as if there is an “other girl” inside her, one whom Lily is determined to keep locked away. When Lily’s father does indeed drown, her mother—an outsider who has never liked their strange little fishing village—whisks the girl away across the wooden footbridge that is the village’s only connection to the outside world, a bridge whose other end is always shrouded in fog. Thus begins a rare caliber of story that should transport and submerge readers in a fantastic and fantastical adventure. Will Lily survive in the world beyond her village? Will she be able to rid herself of this new and terrible power to foresee death? Will she contain the “other girl” developing inside of her? Once started, Lily’s mystical and often macabre journey is nearly impossible to stop reading, as she seeks answers and finds herself in surprising company, such as that of the Rev. Silas Everyman, “a miracle worker,” and his traveling evangelical circus. Despite some seemingly familiar fairy-tale tropes—a witch named Baba Yaga lives in the woods and eats children, for example—little is as it first appears. Like many of the characters, Baba Yaga is more complex than she seems; is she hunting Lily or helping her? Not even Baba Yaga knows for sure. As Andersen has done for the book’s beautifully bizarre yet detailed illustrations, Ford has filled his novel with customs and side stories—some no more than a sentence or two—that make the world feel real, wonderful, and horrifying simultaneously. And though in many ways it seems nothing like one, this novel is at heart a fairy tale in the grand, dark tradition of the best of such stories; the book speaks to the reader’s deepest fears and highest hopes, told through the odyssey of a girl who is scared by what is happening around her and within her.
In this moving and magical literary journey, a heroine grapples with a terrifying power.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59021-268-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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