Although inventive, the plot holds little appeal for readers who’ve never been interested in attending Comic-Con.
Readers who haven’t indulged in comic books since Archie and Jughead first strolled the halls of Riverdale High may find it difficult to relate to Palwick’s (Brief Visits, 2012, etc.) newest novel, a mixture of the serious and the absurd.
Melinda Soto, loving mother and cherished friend, is murdered while on vacation in Mexico. Her adopted son, Jeremy, and her friends manage their grief in varying ways. Jeremy, who drops out of college and finds work in a coffee shop, suffers from survivor’s guilt and feels suffocated by his mother’s friends; college professor Veronique has a meltdown in her classroom; Henrietta, a priest, finds solace in her faith; and gentle Rosemary, a volunteer chaplain at a local hospital, does her best to provide support to Jeremy and her friends while coping with her husband’s illness. But Melinda’s circle are not the only people affected by the tragedy: Following the brutal attack, murderer Percy Clark flies back to his parents’ home in Seattle and commits suicide, leaving behind his own grieving family. His mother, Anna, reaches out to Melinda’s loved ones and seeks to reconnect with her son by reading Percy’s collection of Comrade Cosmos comics. The brainchild of a group of inventive beer pong–playing college students, the comic books have spawned a cult following, which includes Jeremy Soto. Cosmos is a champion of order who appears when disaster strikes a community, and then, once he organizes rebuilding efforts, he returns home to care for his own broken family. The current storyline involves a convoluted plot about Archipelago Osprey and her pet scorpion. When she commits an outrageous act and becomes a fugitive from justice, she blames Cosmos for all her woes. Entering into a pact with the Emperor of Entropy, Archipelago heads for a big showdown at a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament just as Melinda’s friends and Jeremy pile into a van to attend Percy’s memorial service. The serious thread—Palwick’s exploration of the different emotional journeys individuals face when confronted with inexplicable loss—is intelligent and expressive, but when the narrative veers into comic-book mode, the absurdity of the story overwhelms any attempt to meld the two.
Although inventive, the plot holds little appeal for readers who’ve never been interested in attending Comic-Con.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2758-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
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
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