A novel successful in creating a mood of menace.
London-resident Raisin’s first novel is a chilling—at times terrifying—narrative set in rural Yorkshire.
Sam Marsdyke is 19 and no longer in school, primarily because he’d been accused of rape when caught in a compromising position with a girl in his classroom, so he now works on his father’s farm. Farm life depicted here is gritty and grimy and includes sheep-dipping and dog-whelping. Sam’s life has a certain order determined by the flow of the seasons, but things change when a neighboring farm is bought by “towns” (i.e., rich city-folk), allowing Sam to come in contact with 15-year-old Jo Reeves. Given Sam’s past, it’s obviously not advisable to get these two together, but they’re brought together by boredom and by an alienation from modern culture. Eventually things get so bad for Jo at home that she decides to run away, and she persuades Sam to accompany her. What starts as something of a lark, scampering on the Moors à la Cathy and Heathcliff, becomes ominous. After sating themselves in the dining car of a local train, they’re dropped off near Whitby and soon find themselves needing to forage for food. They collude in stealing canned goods from a grocer but are recognized and then become fugitives on the lam. While Jo is ready to return to her cushier life, Sam becomes more controlling, more dominant and more threatening. Because the novel is told through Sam’s eyes, we’re seduced into his way of seeing, and we sense the growing threat posed to Jo but can do nothing about it. Sam’s speech has a quaint, rural quality, part Yorkshire poetry and (seemingly) part Anthony Burgess: “my senses were daffled and out of kilter”; “we were powfagged after our adventures”; “he glegged at his charver but he didn’t know what to do neither.”
A novel successful in creating a mood of menace.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-144875-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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