A meandering story would have been more engaging with a more active protagonist.
Ames offers a debut bildungsroman about a world-weary young Canadian woman who’s smart about business but less savvy about relationships.
Angie Cohen is 17 when her father dies, but she has two memorable brushes with death very soon afterward. First, at her high school’s semiformal dance, held at a funeral home, Angie has a sexual encounter with her date among some coffins; then she learns of the death of a close childhood friend. Angie feels bound by a sense of duty to her late father, so she devotes herself to running his coffee-machine maintenance business after graduating from high school. Between servicing the VendKing 2000 coffee vending machines and coffee makers at real-estate offices, strategizing about growing the business, and dreaming about traveling through Europe, Angie sidelines her plans to attend college. What follows is an episodic account of Angie’s stop-and-start efforts to find a fulfilling future; she also takes the words of a writer friend to heart: “Isn’t that what life is about? Chasing down your past.” Later, in Paris, Angie becomes involved with an artist and helps to kick-start his career—but forfeits a deferred acceptance to a university. When she returns home to Canada, she works as a bartender, and one gap year turns into two. Angie starts classes at one school, then leaves and starts again at another. The novel offers a character study of a young woman struggling with grief and possible depression. However, as Angie heals from her father’s death and finds her own way in life, there aren’t any compelling obstacles to her development, except her own indecision and uncertainty. Although the narration notes, “You make your own shit. Angie had proven this so far,” this description doesn’t quite ring true, as the protagonist is a consistently passive character who bounces from one place to another, even as she laments her lack of purpose. One enjoyable element of the book, though, is the depiction of Angie’s considerable business skills; she always has ideas for improvements—although at her bartending job, the higher-ups don’t effectively make use of her practical mind.
A meandering story would have been more engaging with a more active protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-989718-00-1
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Link & Ava Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 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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