A tense and distressing tale of a sad and all-too-common kidnapping in an exotic land.
A look at the sex trade in East Asia, told as a suspense novel.
This work follows a Vietnam War veteran who returns to his old battlefields to try to save his granddaughter’s life. It all begins when Peter Trutch is interrupted one sunny afternoon by a letter from overseas. An Australian graduate student named Andrew Quang has located a 40-something man in Vietnam named Nguyen Le Ngoc, who claims to be Trutch’s biological son. Trutch is taken aback but recognizes that it’s plausible: in 1971, on medical leave in Nha Trang, he entered into a liaison with a local woman named Dream. Alarmingly, Ngoc’s daughter Lien—Trutch’s granddaughter—appears to have vanished, and her family fears she’s been abducted into the world of underage sex trafficking. Flying back to Vietnam to help search for her, a “knight in shining armor,” Trutch will face a harrowing underworld full of “pimps, thugs, mean-looking bouncers and cops blind to whatever nefarious activity is raging around them.” In three interwoven narrative strands, the book tells of Trutch’s journey in search of Lien, his wife Catherine’s attempts to better understand her husband’s secret, and Lien’s own horrifying story. Eventually, Trutch’s journey—like the war in which he once took part—leads him across the Cambodian border to Phnom Penh’s little Vietnam, Svay Pak. There, shots ring out, Lien cowers in an obscure room out of sight, and seedy officials warn the determined veteran: “You use many big English words. But they do not justify your desire to interfere with our way of life.” Vietnam veteran and humanitarian Logan (co-author: Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart, with Elaine Head, 2013) has been familiar with this region all his adult life and describes it knowingly. Here and there, readers are reminded of the old horrors of the Vietnam War and the re-education camps and the raw feelings that still circulate around them. The author deftly details Lien’s plight. Readers learn of the “rape chambers,” cattle prods, meager food, and regular beatings the kidnapped girls must endure and their constant fear. While some readers may be misled by the novel’s oddly bucolic cover, the dangerous world described therein remains all too real. It’s important that readers be woken up to it.
A tense and distressing tale of a sad and all-too-common kidnapping in an exotic land.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-690-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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