A somber, atypical genre piece with resplendent prose.
In the 17th century, a teenager in a pirate-infested island town becomes an apprentice to an old man who may hold the keys to wealth and abnormally prolonged life in Erikson’s debut fantasy adventure novel.
Jack Higgins and his friends spend much of their time robbing inebriated pirates and squandering the spoils on drinking or gambling. The small group of orphans lives in a trio of caves, collectively known as Under-the-Tree. One day, when a hurricane besieges their town of Cayona on the island of Tortuga, Jack rescues an elderly merchant known as Old Kit, who’s in danger of washing away in the flooding rain. Jack anticipates a monetary reward for saving the affluent Cayona resident, but Kit instead offers him an apprenticeship—the opportunity to learn about myriad cuts of gems and earn his own treasure. Jack’s ensuing busywork with Kit’s enterprises causes the teen’s pal, Will, to compare him to an indentured servant. But soon Jack is assigned an adventure: a search for a cave containing magic stones. Kit says that an Indian sorcerer gave him stones from that cave (“tears from the moon itself”) and that their magic has afforded him a lengthy life. But now the old man is dying and needs Jack to retrieve new stones, which leads him on a surprisingly macabre and perilous expedition. Erikson’s novel primarily depicts Jack as an observer, often listening to others’ tales at length. This suits the story, in which Kit is essentially passing the torch; along the way, Jack witnesses the dark side of business, as even local merchants are a threat as they covet Kit’s treasures. Hints of romance provide relief from the dark tone as Jack pursues Rebecca Van Duyn, a local woman whom he hardly knows. But much of the rest of the narrative is grim, particularly the hunt for magic stones in the final act, which gradually turns into a surreal, sometimes-grotesque ordeal. Erikson’s writing style, however, is persistently elegant, regardless of the content: “The rainbow gleam of dragonflies eddied in and out of the shadows where the trees overhung the slow current.”
A somber, atypical genre piece with resplendent prose.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-615-95764-7
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Cascade View Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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