A sparkling, robust young hero with a distinctive voice—a real winner.
In this novel, a 5-year-old girl (whose father is a minor Jane Austen character) makes unexpected discoveries while adventuring through Europe in search of Utopia.
Sofia-Elisabete remembers the unforgettable months of travel and discovery she enjoyed as a 5-year-old in 1815. Sofia-Elisabete is the child of Col. Fitzwilliam, whom readers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will recall as the likable but poor cousin of Mr. Darcy. Sofia-Elisabete’s mother is a Portuguese bolero dancer, Marisa Soares Belles, who abandons her baby at a convent. She’s eventually reclaimed by her father and taken to Scarborough, England. Blessed with a rich imagination and vigorous self-confidence, the little girl thrives; her father sometimes suffers from war flashbacks and drug-induced lethargies but makes a good marriage and is a fond father. Doña Marisa and her escort, Señor Gonzalez, come to Scarborough “to find a special someone”—in fact, to retrieve Sofia-Elisabete. For some time, the girl believes they’re journeying to “la luna.” Sofia-Elisabete hopes to discover, like the Spaniard in Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, a paradise where hunger and crime don’t exist. Having many adventures across the Continent and over the Alps, the travelers reach Genoa, where Marisa hopes to find a home. While joyful at her mother’s acknowledgement and reunion with her father, Sofia-Elisabete is left with a difficult choice. Kobayashi (Freedom & Mirth, 2017) captures the magical thinking of young children while anchoring the novel’s peregrinations through repetition of key phrases. Each chapter, for example, begins with the formula “My first [memory, foot-race, etc.], thinks I, was….” Sofia-Elisabete’s perfectly original narrative voice is a delight, as is the girl herself; she’s compassionate, imaginative, and always game to master new skills (drumming, rope-dancing, “jodeling,” dancing the bolero). The glimpses of 1815 Europe, such as Dutch cleanliness and Swiss goiters, are well-observed, yet Kobayashi preserves the childlike point of view. While often very funny, the novel has depth in its concern for humanity’s problems and children’s emotions.
A sparkling, robust young hero with a distinctive voice—a real winner.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9985716-5-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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