A fine tale of kids’ games with surprisingly high stakes.
A snake pit of cutthroat ethical ambiguity and twisted psychodrama—otherwise known as junior high girls sports—is explored in this rich, sprawling coming-of-age saga.
In the wealthy suburb of Lake Oswego, Oregon, athletics rule the lives of many kids—and even more so their parents. Among them are seventh-grader Layla Blessing and her girlfriends on the Lake Oswego Junior High Lakers basketball squad and the local soccer club; Layla’s dad, Alex, who winds up coaching both teams to his daughter’s frequent exasperation; Emily, a Chinese-American soccer whiz with an eating disorder brought on by her tiger-parents’ perfectionism; and Chelsea, a court phenom for whom basketball is the only way of engaging with her father. A year in the lives of these and many other characters proceeds through practices, organizational meetings, tournament trips, miscellaneous school activities, and games that the author narrates with detailed play-by-play and strategic analyses that are gripping enough for a Final Four showdown. Journalist Duin (Oil and Water, 2011) uses the subculture of teen sports as a window onto the soul of suburbia, on its genteel yet manic competitiveness and its outsized investments, both material and psychological, in the achievements of offspring. The narrative unfolds in long, luxuriant scenes of ordinary life: girls tanning and gossiping on a dock, awkward school dances, bantering corporate golf games, chance encounters at Starbucks, dinner tables seething with unspoken recriminations. Seemingly trivial sports contests anchor an adult novel that shows us shadows—a charismatic coach turns out to be a masterfully manipulative predator—and real depth in the girls’ (and their parents’) struggles to understand the difference between the rules of the game and genuine morality. Duin’s subtle prose renders all this with pitch-perfect characterizations and razor-sharp social nuance. Sometimes he lays on the pitiless existentialism a bit too thick (“I’ll miss the savage beauty of it,” muses one hard man, reflecting on the ruthless Darwinian culling of weak from strong in seventh-grade girls’ soccer. “Honor and dignity don’t win in the end”). Still, there’s drama beyond the scoreboard in watching these children—and adults—grow up a little more.
A fine tale of kids’ games with surprisingly high stakes.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1618460127
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Library Partners Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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