Many wonderful scenes bear witness for people too often left voiceless in American literature, but coming on the heels of...
From Oprah Book Club alum O’Dell (Back Roads, 2000, etc.), the far-fetched tale of a cab driver whose long-lost sister turns out to be a surrogate-mother-for-hire.
Narrator Shae-Lynn Penrose, the author’s first female protagonist, is a ballsy, sassy delight, but the story she tells verges on ridiculous. Shae-Lynn’s sister Shannon turns up after 18 years, pregnant with her tenth baby and planning, as usual, to sell it to a wealthy couple. Shannon has run out on the sleazy New York lawyer who sets up the adoptions because she’s made her own deal with a Connecticut woman and doesn’t want to share the money. Both of these caricatures come looking for her in Centresburg, the Penroses’ hard-pressed hometown in Pennsylvania coal country; so does an equally cartoonish Russian gangster, the buddy of another guy Shannon double-crossed. How did Shae-Lynn’s sister get to be so callous? The answer lies in the girls’ miserable childhood with a widowed father so brutal that when Shannon disappeared, her sister assumed he’d killed her. Shae-Lynn has blunt, bracing things to say about the complicity of their blue-collar community, which disapproved of Dad beating his daughters but did nothing to stop him; she saw lots of domestic abuse swept under the rug during her years as a police officer in Centresburg. Dad wasn’t the only brutal coalminer, and even good men like Shae-Lynn’s beloved friend E.J., who survived a cave-in two years ago, bear the physical and psychic wounds inflicted by their back-breaking profession. O’Dell’s unsentimental, loving depiction of working-class life is as moving as ever. Also familiar, unfortunately, is her weakness for lurid plotting, which here includes the heavily foreshadowed exposure of the man who fathered Shae-Lynn’s illegitimate baby and the mustache-twirling cynicism with which he reveals his base nature to their horrified adult son.
Many wonderful scenes bear witness for people too often left voiceless in American literature, but coming on the heels of the majestic, passionate Coal Run (2004), this undisciplined novel is a disappointment.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-35126-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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