A charming and sometimes frightening ghost story.
An apparition remains trapped in a house where a tragic crime occurred.
The novel opens with Max, a young boy, asking his tutor, Claire Harvey, to tell him a tale. She spins a moving ghost story about a young girl whose family plans to move far away. Her distraught boyfriend kills her and then himself so they can always be together. The twist is that Claire is that girl, and she’s a spirit stuck in the house where she was murdered. That first chapter could stand alone as a short story, but the rest of the book builds off of that, showing Claire’s afterlife in the house and the various people who reside there, ending with a battle that involves ghost hunters. She feels a special affinity for Max, who falls in love with her. It affects him later in life when he tries to date and then start a family. There is also a backstory about Claire’s confusion when she first woke up and didn’t realize she was a phantom. She thought her family had abandoned her and had to figure out what happened, which provides some sad and intriguing moments. Half the fun of reading ghost stories is in the rules authors create for their universes, and Galindo (The Tesla Project, 2016, etc.) has made his enjoyable and slightly complicated. Only people who believe in ghosts can spot Claire, but she has trouble seeing some of the living souls who don’t believe in spirits. This becomes poignant when a nonbeliever dies and can suddenly spy her, and she watches him move on while she can’t. In this entertaining story, Claire is an appealing character. Galindo has added some superb twists to her world, and the timeline allows him to show her perspective as technology and trends advance. But the novel isn’t faultless. Despite her comments about strange devices, Claire feels more modern in her dialogue and action than she should be—at one point, she craves a hamburger, recalling what it smelled like in real life. But she died in 1899, before the item became popular in America. And one philosophical battle toward the end between Max and a ghost hunter appears suddenly enough that it feels more like a plot device than a natural, story-driven occurrence. Still, none of these quibbles should wreck this tale for fans of the supernatural.
A charming and sometimes frightening ghost story.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946921-00-0
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Tin Can
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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