Ritter artfully and realistically depicts a rough road to adulthood with a wartime motif.
Coming-of-age experiences contrast with the Korean War in Ritter’s debut novel.
A single mother gives up her son, Timothy, for adoption, and the novel follows his life from childhood to adolescence and, finally, as a soldier in the Korean War. Throughout his life, Timothy struggles. Adoptive parents John and Martha do their best to raise him, but he falls in with two ne’er do wells, Wes and Raymond, who encourage bad behavior, theft and general nastiness. At various junctures in his youth, Timothy takes wrong turns, such as not visiting a potential girlfriend, instead choosing to get drunk. For some reason, as a teen, he is encouraged to babysit 6-year-old Cindy. Undaunted by his surly manner, she is kind to him and teaches him to waltz to Tchaikovsky. The music has a powerful effect, helping Timothy break out of his usual hostility and appreciate beauty. This scene is mirrored later when he helps a lost young Korean girl during the war; the music replays inside his head as he dances with her amid the rubble. Another parallel occurs when he encounters Jake, who helped his birth mother when she was desperate and alone, also aids Timothy in a similar fashion. While the narrative is strong in description, such as Timothy’s vision of a “shimmering paladin,” and in its dreamlike qualities, Timothy is a frustrating protagonist due to the poor choices he makes. When Humphrey is introduced as Timothy’s fellow Marine, the reader breathes a sigh of relief; he is the voice of sanity, reads Ecclesiastes (from which the book’s title is drawn) and actually listens to Timothy. Gunny Talbot, who leads the soldiers’ regiment, also is a mentor and offers guidance. The author has adopted children and his father fought in Korea, lending experience and believability to the subject, which is also enhanced by the author’s cited resources used in researching the war.
Ritter artfully and realistically depicts a rough road to adulthood with a wartime motif.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2006
ISBN: 978-1425920104
Page Count: 329
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
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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