Truong remains a stunning wordsmith and a whiz at intellectual showmanship, but Linda’s story tastes of artificial plot...
After the dazzle of her debut (The Book of Salt, 2003), Truong returns with a coming-of-age narrative about a young girl who has always felt like an outsider in her small North Carolina town, not to mention within her own family.
Narrator Linda, born in 1968, hears words as tastes. There is no obvious logic—“Mother” becomes chocolatemilk, “tomorrow” becomes breakfastsausage—but the result makes for lovely juxtapositions. Adored by her lawyer father Thomas and her uncle Baby Harper, a librarian, Linda senses she is merely tolerated by her mother DeAnne. At seven, Linda begins what becomes a lifelong written snail-mail correspondence with best friend Kelly. After 11-year-old Linda is raped by the teenager who mows the family’s lawn, she blames her mother for neither noticing nor protecting her. The rape interferes with Linda’s budding romance with sensitive Wade, the object of Kelly’s affection as well. In high school, previously overweight but precocious Kelly thins and dumbs down to join the popular crowd until she gets pregnant (father unnamed but obvious) and must leave town her senior year. Tomboyish Linda takes the school-valedictorian route, smoking cigarettes to block taste “incomings” that make academic concentration difficult. After her father’s death when she is 17, Linda leaves for Yale. Flash forward to 1998. Now a lawyer whose fiancé leaves her when cancer makes childbearing impossible, Linda discovers she has an actual neurological condition called synesthesia, which causes “involuntary mixing of the senses.” She also finally acknowledges what readers have long suspected: by birth Linda is Vietnamese; she was adopted after her birth father and mother, whom Thomas had loved while in law school, if not more recently, died in a fire. As Linda learns about her secret history as well as her Uncle’s sexual secrets and DeAnne’s private heartache, she and DeAnne grow closer and learn to forgive, perhaps even love, one another.
Truong remains a stunning wordsmith and a whiz at intellectual showmanship, but Linda’s story tastes of artificial plot manipulation.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6908-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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