An orphan’s tale delivers a delightful combination of tones and is bound to leave readers both smiling and thoughtful.
A novel examines the fascination, pity, and prejudice in an unusual child’s life as well as the challenges of dreaming outside the mold.
Hug Chickenpenny is a boy beset by misfortune and uncertainty. Born with a strange appearance—white hair, a stump of a left arm, a red eye, and a lumpy head—and orphaned from birth, he would seem to be in for a hard life. Although many at the orphanage look at him with sorrow or scorn, Hug nonetheless approaches the world with curiosity and optimism, looking past the petty slings and arrows of the harsher people around him and dreaming of exploration and adventure through rockets. But while some figures are sympathetic to Hug, like George Dodgett, a young employee at the orphanage, and a woman named Abigail Westinghouse, there are plenty of challenges to Hug’s positivity. These road blocks include people like Jennifer Kimberly, a cruel receptionist—and later, administrator—of the orphanage, and Dr. Hannersby, a scientist who studies “anomalies” like Hug and wishes to adopt him more as a pet and object of curiosity than a son. What follows is a complex, Dickensian tale of ambiguity and abnormality but, above all, hope. Zahler’s (A Congregation of Jackals, 2017, etc.) prose is solid, and the dialogue in particular shines, feeling natural without betraying the gothic style of the story. The characters are sometimes broad and archetypal, but that works in this sort of tale. They all have a certain edge, as even those with earnest affection for Hug can’t help but find some of his singular characteristics off-putting: “Something clicked and clacked behind the brunette, who then spun around to see what was happening. Hug was looking over his own back. His head was turned all the way around. Abigail shuddered.” Nevertheless, the narrative has a nonchalant tone that keeps the events from feeling excessively tragic even while they’re not overly sanitized. On the same note, the novel thankfully avoids depicting Hug as magical, presenting him as precocious without ascribing mysticism to disability. These are difficult balances to strike, and the book should be lauded for accomplishing that alone, even before getting to the charm and optimism that infuse the dark story.
An orphan’s tale delivers a delightful combination of tones and is bound to leave readers both smiling and thoughtful.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946487-00-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Cinestate
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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