Prequel to Starhawk's eco-feminist future fantasy The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), which placed 99-year-old witch Maya Greenwood in the Great War of the 21st century. Here, Maya, an aging flower child and the author of the Goddess-celebrating work From the Mountain, has lost interest in her black lover, Johanna Weaver; is overweight; burnt out; and decides that she needs recharging in Nepal, the home of the gods. While on her Himalayan trek, Maya reviews her life. Others on the journey keep her answering well-meant but irritating questions about matriarchy and the Goddess Mother of the Universe. Maya carries with her the ashes of her mother; she intends to scatter them on high. Maya is a bisexual lesbian, as is Johanna. They had become lovers in high school and have lived together on and off, although the mercurial Johanna has also had a series of male and female lovers. Why can't Johanna call herself a lesbian? Maya implores. ``It's easy for you to call yourself a lesbian, make the great political gesture,'' Johanna replies, ``but I am a black woman before I'm anything else, and the first word in that is black.'' As a witch, Maya tries to teach through rituals that arouse energy and help ``heal our shattered cultural imagination.'' Another ex-lover, the hard-drinking stud Rio Connolly, reenters the scene. They've recently reencountered each other, after 17 years, at the Nevada Test Site Peace Camp, where Maya had joined the protest against nuclear testing. Their youthful love affair (which left Maya pregnant) was severed by Rio's lengthy jail term for second-degree murder. Juggling two ex-lovers, Maya also has agonizing memories of her sister and mother to make peace with while trying to grasp the guidance of the Rinpoche on the mountain and to deepen her understanding of the Goddess. Starhawk's cult will find this uplifting and entertaining, if too loose for great impact. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-10233-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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