A spooky, surreal ghost story that’s elevated by its humanity.
In this literary ghost story/psychological thriller, a woman is forced to confront her past when sticks begin appearing out of thin air.
“There was another stick,” begins this novel, words that sound simple—but the reality is terrifying to Barbara. Until recently, she was living a dull but settled life. But then Nothing began to produce broom handle–sized sticks from Nowhere right in her apartment. She can find no rational explanation for them or for the other strange things and people (a muscular black woman, a little girl with long braids) she begins to see and sense. The sticks keep coming, and so does Barbara’s dead father. Divining that he wants her to investigate his supposed suicide, she returns to her hometown. Her mother and brother still live there, the brother believing his bunker mates from Vietnam, which he left four years ago, are still present and speaking to him. The family’s undercurrents are disturbing: Barbara’s mother beat her children and is still controlling and abusive, while her father “was witty and likable to outsiders…but he was cruelly cynical at home.” As Barbara investigates his death, her brother plans, crazily, to kill her. She suffers great personal and psychological danger, finding nevertheless at the end of her ordeal that there is untapped potential within herself. In her debut novel, Greene orchestrates Barbara’s increasing horror well, raising the pitch with each new strange encounter while deepening the sense of dread. For example, an early remark, “Barbara’s relationship with her father became as intimate as it had been in childhood,” takes on sinister meaning as the novel develops. The plot is dark and gets darker, but at the same time, Greene threads subtle notes of possible connection throughout: the black woman sneers but offers advice and help; the child tells her “I can help you find love.” Moments of sly humor leaven the novel as well. Satisfyingly, the place Barbara gets to is as hard-won as any explorer’s mountaintop or ocean depth. Barbara earns it, and so does Greene.
A spooky, surreal ghost story that’s elevated by its humanity.Pub Date: May 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5431-5326-2
Page Count: 199
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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