Decently done but unremarkable: second-novelist Averill (Secrets of the Tsil Café, 2001) creates some memorable characters...
A fair-to-middling coming-of-ager set in Kansas, where the flatness of the plains can’t obscure the dark shadows of family secrets cast long ago in Scotland.
Glasgow, Kansas, has very little in common with its Scottish counterpart other than its name and the presence of Rob MacPherson. Born and reared in the Gorbals slums of the old Glasgow, Rob came to the new one in 1952 with his infant son Ewan in tow. Mourning his wife (who’d died in childbirth while crossing the Atlantic and was buried at sea) and homesick for his native land, Rob manages to settle into life in the new world, finding work at the post office and acquiring some renown for his skill with the bagpipes as well as the ladies. Ewan, by contrast, grows up a quiet and reserved young man not much given to his father’s favorite pastimes of whiskey and adultery. He does fall in love, though, with Shirley Porter—the daughter of one of Rob’s many conquests. After high school, Ewan and Shirley court scandal by moving in with each other while still unmarried, an arrangement that Rob encourages, somewhat to his son’s surprise. When Ewan discovers Shirley and his father in flagrante delicto, his surprise turns to outrage. He can break off with Shirley (and does), but he’s stuck with his father, an untrustworthy jerk but the only blood kin Ewan has left in the world. Or so he thinks: The discovery of a secret family album gives Ewan a new and unsuspected insight into his origins and leads him to retrace his father’s steps back to Glasgow in search of his mother. The truth, when it comes, is as sad as family secrets can be—but it explains a lot more than the past.
Decently done but unremarkable: second-novelist Averill (Secrets of the Tsil Café, 2001) creates some memorable characters but does little with them, and the lost-mother theme seems very old hat by now.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-425-19081-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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