An unflinching portrait of a victim-turned-predator; sometimes repulsive but unquestionably potent.
A young woman who survived a brutal rape seeks retribution against her assailants while directing homicidal rage at men in general in Anderson’s (Winds, 2015, etc.) unforgiving thriller.
The four men who raped and mutilated teenager Megan Williams four years ago left her for dead. She pulls through, awakening from a coma and undergoing reconstructive surgery. Cops think the rapists, still at large, had intended to attack Megan’s then-roommate and older sister, Susan. Megan concurs with the vengeance-minded woman secretly living near Susan, convinced the men will, in due course, follow her sister home from Terri’s Restaurant where she waitresses. Megan, however, hates every male she spots eying her or Susan, and anyone who takes Megan home will suffer relentless torture. Columnist Rodney Engleworth, a former investigative journalist, notes similarities between recent murders and Megan’s attack, with male bodies mutilated in ways comparable to Megan. But there have been other rapes/murders with the same modus operandi over the last several years, and sure enough, Megan sees a man at Terri’s who she believes is one of her attackers. Rod, his editor, Timothy Goodman, and Officer Elsie Dorr track down an unidentified woman caught on camera with one of the victims. At the same time, Megan, with a loaded gun, waits for her suspect to contact his three equally guilty friends. The novel is merciless, with the abused main character committing barbaric acts. In Megan’s first-person perspective, she’s seemingly conversing with the men she’s butchering, but that may be only in her head. She apathetically details her rape and explicitly relays what she’s doing to the men, including mutilating genitals. The investigating team can occasionally be too dense: they initially don’t suspect Megan due to her physical condition, though no one’s seen her (not even Susan) for six months. Sympathy comes in the form of Rod, a widower who lost his wife, Helen, to cancer. But he saturates pages with more dourness, at one point equating Helen with an old car that a mechanic (doctor) couldn’t fix. Fortunately, scenes hinting at a romance between Tim and Elsie temporarily relieve the story of its gloomy tone. The ending is appropriately dark but satisfactory.
An unflinching portrait of a victim-turned-predator; sometimes repulsive but unquestionably potent.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-937491-17-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: 2AM Publications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
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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