Even fans who thought they’d already seen enough of Natchez Trace will find Barr’s tenth as inventive, as ingenious, and...
After a season out west among killer bears (Blood Lure, 2001), Anna Pigeon, who’s made her reputation by keeping on the move, is back as District Ranger in Mississippi’s Natchez Trace National Parkway. The Natchez Trace is every bit as beautiful as ever, and insubordinate male underlings like Randy Thigpen (Deep South, 2000) still resent her every bit as much. What’s new is the crisis in her romance with Claiborne County Sheriff Paul Davidson, an Episcopal priest who’s separated, though not divorced, from his calculating wife, and the most embarrassing corpse she’s ever been called away from somebody else’s wedding to examine. Good ol’ boy Doyce Barnette, smothered and stripped to his Fruit of the Looms, has been deposited on Grandma Polly’s decorous bed at the former working plantation Mt. Locust, looking just like a beached whale with a weakness for kinky sex. The revelation is bound to heat up relations among the poker-playing buddies who solemnly alibi each other for the night Doyce died, and the race for Adams County Sheriff, since Doyce’s undertaker brother Ray, who’d hoped to replace Clintus Jones, now has to endure this final affront. Digging deeper, however, Anna finds more dark secrets, from a century-old land grab to a much more recent band of poachers. As usual, the most dangerous species in the park turns out to walk on two legs.
Even fans who thought they’d already seen enough of Natchez Trace will find Barr’s tenth as inventive, as ingenious, and finally as riveting as the very best of this distinguished series.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14846-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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