Readers will likely welcome a sequel to this well-wrought historical family saga.
McIlvain (Stein House, 2013, etc.) takes readers back to Texas at the end of Reconstruction in a novel about a man trying to come to terms with his biracial son’s radical decision and the return of a woman whom he’d thought he’d lost.
In 1875, plantation owner Al Waters’ gifted son Toby, who’s leaving for Harvard Medical School in the fall, comes home from a college graduation party enraged by a rumor that he’s not wholly white—although his skin is light enough that he can easily “pass” as Caucasian, as he has all his life. Al confesses that Toby’s mother was a black slave; Toby was conceived, Al says, on a night when he was drunk and despondent over the fact that a woman named Amelia wouldn’t leave her husband for him. Later, Toby, for reasons that are hard for Al to fathom, decides to embrace the black side of his heritage; the young man comes back from his first year at Harvard with his hair cut very close to highlight his new identity. Al had married his brother’s widow and freed her slaves, and he now runs the plantation as a cooperative with the freedmen; members of the Ku Klux Klan try to terrify the cooperative into submission, but they’re beaten back. Meanwhile, Al continues to struggle with his son’s choices. To say that McIlvain writes well is an understatement; she makes readers truly feel for her characters, and as a result, they seem very much like real people, not fictional ones. Among the notable secondary players is Amelia, whom Al marries, and she helps him reconcile with Toby in a process that proves to be long and subtle. There’s definitely a sagalike quality to McIlvain’s tale, with key moments of both sorrow and optimism—good people die, but others carry on and have children. She also offers an ending that will remind readers that the end of Reconstruction was also the beginning of Jim Crow. But still, through it all, one gets a sense of indomitable hope.
Readers will likely welcome a sequel to this well-wrought historical family saga.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63363-351-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: White Bird Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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