A half-baked and sometimes-disturbing tale.
Meyers (Another’s Fool, 2017, etc.) offers a Western about a 12-year-old who assists his uncles in the capture of an infamous thief.
In 1922, young Bing is the nephew of a sheriff and his deputy in Wilbarger County, Texas. As such, he doesn’t spend his days in school. Instead, his Uncle Jim and Uncle Rube let him tag along on important missions, including collecting prisoners off the local train and locking them up in town. One day, Frank Holloway—the notorious “Oklahoma Yeggman” (the latter term a slang word for “safe-cracker”)—comes to town in chains. He was recently caught for pickpocketing in Chicago, and many people consider him to be a shadow of his former glory. But Uncle Jim believes that the yeggman is as mischievous as ever, and he encourages Bing to treat him as a highly skilled criminal. After Holloway pleads not guilty and gets released until his next court hearing, he ends up robbing the local bank, and Bing joins Jim and Rube as they try to beat him to the Mexican border. The yeggman’s crimes bring to mind those in The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) and The Sting (1973). As Bing tracks the convict, he observes how the Wild West is disappearing, only to make way for new crimes and punishments. In this way, Meyers effectively shows how the era of the Old West met the Victorian Age. In general, however, the book would have been clearer if it had simply used more pronouns; the author’s style of dialogue often lacks them, resulting in half-formed thoughts and cryptic details: “Going home tomorrow. Won’t stay here, you can bet on that!” Also, the book repeatedly and uncomfortably suggests that older adults find the 12-year-old protagonist to be sexually attractive. For instance, one of Uncle Jim’s friends looks at Bing and comments, “How lips—so ruby red!—impress one as wishing to be pressed with one’s own.”
A half-baked and sometimes-disturbing tale.Pub Date: June 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63263-870-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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