While not every offering will surprise readers, these tales provide new ways of looking at biblical figures.
A collection of short stories centers on the time of Jesus.
Casper’s (The Sing Song Child, 2015) first tale in this volume begins with a carpenter with a withered hand. Although the man did well for himself, at one point he angered the wrong Pharisee and people began to wonder if his deformity was a curse from God. When the carpenter meets Jesus, his hand is miraculously healed. The story has its origins in the Gospel of Mark, and most of the other tales here also have their bases in the New Testament. There is the conversion of Saul of Tarsus; the quelling of a tempest by Jesus on the Sea of Galilee; and the changing of water into wine at a wedding celebration. Portions that stray from biblical material include “Right Hand Man,” a firsthand account of a robber and murderer who is crucified on Golgotha, and “Thief,” which features letters Judas Iscariot, “that rodent of a man,” writes to himself. One foray into more modern times involves a demon’s attempt to trick a dying war veteran. Each story is written in plain language, as in “Thief” (“He cleared his throat. I could see tears streaming down his cheeks”), and kept relatively short, about 10 pages or less. Some of these brief narratives work well in humanizing otherwise opaque situations. What might it feel like to be a criminal in the time of Jesus and suffer crucifixion for a misdeed? The story of the robber skillfully drives home the brutality of Roman rule, not to mention the nearly inconceivable idea of being personally involved in one of the most famous narratives of all time. By contrast, more familiar tales are somewhat less thrilling. The man with the withered hand doesn’t have a whole lot in his backstory of interest. Sure, the Pharisee he angered was hypocritical and the protagonist jokingly admits that he was a better carpenter than Jesus, but such details hardly make him memorable. Likewise, the rendition of Saul’s miraculous change does not add much to the biblical telling. Nevertheless, the pieces progress smoothly and are strongest when expanding on (in an easy-to-read manner) what any reader with a loose understanding of the New Testament already knows.
While not every offering will surprise readers, these tales provide new ways of looking at biblical figures.Pub Date: June 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9905144-1-1
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Sing Song Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
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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