Unmemorable.
In a North Carolina mountain hamlet, the renovation of a crumbling mansion reveals unsettling secrets.
Paxton Osgood, pampered daughter of one of Walls of Water, N.C.’s, wealthiest families, is planning a gala to mark the 75th anniversary of the Women’s Society Club, founded by her grandmother Agatha. The invitations go awry due to a freak storm, which is a harbinger that dark forces still lurk at the gala site, the Blue Ridge Madam manor, once owned by lumber barons, the Jacksons, who lost their money when their logging grounds were turned into a national forest. The house, deemed haunted, was abandoned for decades until salvaged by the Osgoods, who plan on converting it to a bed and breakfast. Paxton’s brother Colin has returned from his world travels to landscape the grounds, but when a gnarled peach tree is uprooted to make way for a statelier transplant tree, a skull is found in the crater. Local shopkeeper Willa Jackson, whose grandmother Georgie was 17 when the Jacksons fell from grace, declines her invitation to the gala—her ancestral memories have made her hostile to Walls of Water’s affluent residents, and too many people recall that, in high school, she was a prankster whose antics were blamed on Colin. The skull undoubtedly belonged to Tucker Devlin, a charismatic, need we say devilish grifter who came to town in 1936, instantly captivating all resident females with predictably dire results. Devlin concentrated his blandishments on the Jacksons, persuading them to invest their last dollars in an ill-advised peach orchard at an altitude unconducive to fruit. Georgie now occupies the same nursing home as her former best friend Agatha, but only Agatha is still of sound mind: She reveals that she formed the Women's Society Club not for philanthropic purposes but to reckon with Tucker. Discordant notes of magic realism at times distract from what is essentially a benign tale of spunky Southern women finding true love after overcoming not-very-significant challenges.
Unmemorable.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80722-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
