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
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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