A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.
Kemanis (Love & Crimes, 2017, etc.) sets an intrepid prosecutor up against some high school drama with deadly consequences in this latest Dana Hargrove legal thriller.
Westchester County, New York, 2009: The new district attorney, Hargrove, takes office just as the adverse effects of the Great Recession—unemployment, domestic abuse, increased levels of substance abuse—start to take hold in her jurisdiction. Then the frozen body of a teen suicide is discovered in the Hudson River; it’s Naomi Steuben, a shy, overweight girl who’d recently been the victim of vicious online bullying by two classmates. Her grieving parents pressure the DA’s office to deliver justice, and Hargrove and her team must figure out how to prosecute the case without any cyberbullying laws on the books. As the attorneys—Hargrove; her husband, Evan Goodhue; and their rival Vesma Krumins—struggle to work within the law, the Hargroves’ kids, Travis and Natalie Goodhue, and Vesma’s daughter, Ginger, endure the petty and sometimes-harmful world of high school. Natalie is forced to testify against her peers, which has consequences for her entire family. Hargrove may not be able to keep her kids safe from the world’s tragedies, but she’ll do whatever she can to make sure justice is served. Kemanis writes in a style that adeptly dramatizes legal arguments while also finding moments of stark lyricism, as when she describes the moment just before Naomi’s wintry death: “With all physical sensation gone, the rest of it is now almost a memory, not even that. The remaining bits float away into the vast, sucking expanse of black sky over the river.” Although court cases figure heavily into the novel’s plot, the author manages to transcend the genre somewhat by delving so deeply into the lives of the teenage characters and their social circle. The result is a novel about how communities contend with their children’s coming-of-age, particularly in an era when technology is shifting the ground beneath everyone’s feet.
A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997850-0-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Opus Nine Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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