A well-told, affecting story that beautifully demonstrates the healing process.
A YA novel in verse tells the story of a girl dealing with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse with the help of a counselor and therapy group.
Meminger (Into the Wise Dark, 2012, etc.) explains in a foreword that this novel is “a fictionalized memoir” that draws on her own experience. Anjal, nicknamed “Anji,” is part of a Sikh family that left Punjab looking for a better future when she was young. (Their destination isn’t named.) When Anji is 6, she and her 3-year-old brother, Surjit, start attending day care at a Sikh temple, or gurdwara. Her parents believe that she’ll be safe “in god’s house,” but Anji is sexually abused there many times. She’s told not to make trouble, so she remains silent, but by high school, she starts to break down, due to depression and repressed anger. While writing in her journal, she discovers that “a kind of lava wants to flow / hot black ink onto the page.” A compassionate English teacher recommends that she seek counseling. At first, Anji is confused by her therapist Cathy’s questions, but the sessions help her to finally talk about her abuse. Her therapy, support group, creative projects, and political protests help her to heal, and she finally leaves home to find her own way in the world. The verse format works surprisingly well for this story; Anji’s voice is fresh, strong, and concise, and the author offers poetic images and language along the way. Some stories of abuse devote many pages to describing the abuse itself, but Meminger instead concentrates on showing how therapy works, revealing Cathy’s caring, careful questions and comments, and the support that Anji receives from other girls. Meminger also effectively shows how Cathy helps Anji to find her emotional truth: “no one really actually hurt me / like, I wasn’t violently raped or anything / some girls are // Cathy’s words are soft, / and yet here you are / with me.”
A well-told, affecting story that beautifully demonstrates the healing process.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9831583-4-9
Page Count: 420
Publisher: See It Be It Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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