Most of Alan’s cases are thrillers, but despite several homicides here, the leading threat facing the hero is whether he’ll...
Boulder psychotherapist Alan Gregory takes time off from a practice that includes more than its share of killers (Dry Ice, 2007, etc.) to hunt down several vanished babies and their mothers.
The morning after six campers met Estonian cafeteria cook Jaana Peet on the floor of the Grand Canyon, she disappeared from her companion, Nick Paulson, without a trace. Years later, two of the six turn up in Alan’s life courtesy of his ex-wife Merideth. A hard-charging TV newsmagazine producer, Merideth has had several miscarriages. Determined to become a mother, she’s hired Lisa, one of the campers who left the Canyon without searching for the missing Jaana, as surrogate mother to carry a child to term for Merideth and her fiancé, political consultant Eric Leffler, another of the campers who hiked out instead of looking for Jaana. Now that Lisa has gone missing from her New York apartment, Merideth insists that Alan help find her and her unborn child. Alan’s ever-complicated domestic life makes him the perfect candidate for Merideth’s plan, since he’s already in Manhattan acting as a lifeline for Jonas, the child Alan’s late friend Adrienne commended to his care. Alan can’t expect any help from his wife, Boulder ADA Lauren Crowder, who’s off in Holland seeking to trace an out-of-wedlock daughter she gave up for adoption many years before. Several of the tangled plotlines eventually bear fruit, but not nearly enough to justify their number, complexity or lack of interrelation.
Most of Alan’s cases are thrillers, but despite several homicides here, the leading threat facing the hero is whether he’ll sleep with any of the attractive women who seem determined to throw themselves at him—and whether he’ll ever be able, as therapists say, to move on with his life.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-96006-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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