Brown brings back the wacky Hunsenmeir sisters attended by all the good and not-so-good folk of Runnymede (Six of One, 1978; Bingo, 1988), as middle age and war give a new edge to their chronic if overhyped sibling rivalry. Runnymede, straddling the Mason-Dixon line, is one of those fictional towns full of people who gossip and bicker but whose hearts are mostly kind. There are, however, a few exceptions: the unforgiving Josephine Smith, Juts’s mother-in-law, and the treacherous Rife brothers—after Pearl Harbor, they try to blame a fire they set on the town’s only Japanese-American. When the story opens in April 1941, Louise (Wheezer), devout and prissy, is approaching her 40th birthday and doesn’t want to admit it; she’s also worried about her adolescent daughter Mary. Now 36, younger sister Juts (Julia), a free-spirited rule-breaker, wants a baby, but the problem may be husband Chessy’s infertility. As the years whirl by, the sisters face the return of their long-gone father, Chessy’s affair, and Mary’s teenage pregnancy. They also add their own colorful contribution to everything from church, where Juts’s cat destroys the altar flowers on Easter, to the war effort. On duty one night as CivilAir Patrol volunteers, they sound the siren after seeing geese flying overhead, claiming they saw German Stukas. And when Juts mentions Wheezer’s age at Cadwalder’s soda fountain, the sisters get into such a fight that they have to open a beauty salon (The Curl “n” Twirl) to pay for the damage they cause. Chessy and Juts eventually adopt Nicole, the daughter of a young woman who went to Washington to work and became pregnant. By 1950 the two sisters feel a lot older, not much wiser but still determined to keep fighting—mostly life, yet often each other. Vivid characters and strong women. The frequent one-liners often seem more sitcom than novel material, going nowhere and telling less, but there are still good laughs along the way.
Pub Date: July 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-09972-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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