The prolific Brown (Pay Dirt, 1995, etc.) takes a high-risk plot device—time travel—and attempts to meld it with reincarnation, romance, and contemporary satire. The result: some interesting characters, more than a few laugh-out-loud lines, and a story that in the end sinks under the weight of its impossible plot. Pryor Deyhle Blackwood, nicknamed ``Cig'' (we're not told why: cigarettes? cygnet?), is a young widow struggling with a mortgage, two adolescents, a floundering career in real estate, and bad memories of her now-dead husband's philandering. Cig has one great joy, however—foxhunting, an enthusiasm obviously shared by the author (the hunting scenes that pepper the novel are full of dash and clamor). Caught up in her emotional funk, Cig allows a magic fox to lead her through time to 1699, where she takes the place of her ancestral namesake, Pryor Deyhle, on a colonial Virginia plantation. There, she must quickly learn to adapt and survive—as Cig handles with equal aplomb Indian raiders, blizzards, colonial dowagers, and the lack of modern conveniences. She quickly finds an ally in Margaret, her colonial sister-in-law and soulmate, whose attitudes, while leavened with 17th-century spirituality, are more modern than many a 20th-century woman's. Cig also encounters Lionel deVries, the colonial incarnation of her husband, who is just as compelling in this life as he was in the 20th century. But in 1699 Lionel has a rival for Cig's affections, and Cig's recognition that she can claim her own path toward true love and happiness is what gives her the strength to prevail in her own time. Brown's meticulously researched descriptions of Virginia's colonial life, as well as her dead-on ridicule of modern-day bad behavior, bring vigor to a tale that's otherwise not a coherent whole.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-09605-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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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