A man seeking to make amends reflects on his complicated relationships with his two sons.
Readers of Criswell’s 2012 novel Peacemaker will recognize the sequel’s opening courtroom scene, but the point of view will be unfamiliar. In the earlier book, readers watched through the eyes of 18-year-old Jayson “Shorty” Jackson as he came before a judge in a Michigan state court at the end of serving two years in juvenile detention for shooting his friend Michael Stephens. Stephens was a promising student with a scholarship to Michigan State University. In the audience were Jayson’s relatives, including a thin, wiry man he barely recognized at first as his father, Jayson “Big Man” Jackson. Peacemaker described the son’s fraught relationship with his father through the son’s eyes; in Criswell’s sequel, the perspectives are reversed and expanded. “Big Man” not only tells his own story in these pages, but, in an unexpected elaboration that Criswell handles adeptly, he also learns the story of his own father, “Pops,” and his Uncle Buddy, told in long flashback scenes in which Jim Crow Mississippi and racially charged midcentury Detroit come to life in significant detail. (Pops recalls the 1967 Twelfth Street Riot in Detroit: “It looked like something out of a war zone. The street was in total chaos. Folks were screaming, fighting, breaking windows, flipping over cars, looting and burning down businesses.”) The narrative is significantly complicated with these rapid-fire shifts in time frame, switching from Pops’ story to his son’s and grandson’s, but Criswell controls the material with an immense degree of skill, pacing her revelations about all three characters so that the generational story never loses its energy. Readers of the earlier volume will know some of the key plot surprises before they happen, but the sequel is knowingly crafted for newcomers as well, investing all of its main characters with three-dimensional believability. They may at times think simplified, negative things about each other, but the reader is never tempted to follow suit. Indeed, the struggle that Criswell’s men have being good fathers and sons is the most rewarding aspect of this gripping novel.
A historically detailed, emotionally rich story of three generations of men dealing with and sometimes evading their duties to one another.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6551-6
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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