A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.
A gripping account of the intricately woven mind of a teenager.
In small-town Minnesota, Colin is not much more than a troubled preteen with an older sister, Heather, who resents him (and everything else), an older brother, Paul, who has autism, parents who grow increasingly distant as time passes, friends he can’t rely on, and a budding, unruly sexuality. When his father commits suicide, Colin is forced to pick up the pieces of his broken family while contemplating both his own death and homosexuality. “It was impossible for a boy to just grow into a new face, a new body and skin….In the world he imagined, boys stepped out of their old skin and that was the end.” If only it were as easy as shedding an old skin for a new one. Simultaneously, Colin's mother, Diane, faces similar issues—though on an adult scale. She begins therapy sessions to deal with grief, picks up unhealthy habits, and gets significantly closer to Colin, neglecting her other two children. Colin and Diane quickly form a redoubtable duo—though much of their development happens when they are separated—that turns its back on societal expectations. For Diane, Colin is her peer—and vice versa. The result is intoxicating. Nathan has crafted an all-consuming novel in which topics like suicide, homosexuality, parenting, friendship, and psychology make up a precarious tableau in which readers can leave their own subjectivity behind and experience the world from Colin’s singular viewpoint. “Nobody caught the names he called himself. Nobody saw him put his hands together and nobody knew what god he prayed to, what promises he made. Nobody saw him unfold his hands and look at his wrists where the blood flowed fragile and breathless and blue….Nobody knew was he was thinking.”
A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-798-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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