Tenth historical epic in the First North Americans Series (People of the Mist, 1998, etc.) by archaeologists Gear and Gear, this time focusing on pre-Colombian peoples living in what’s now New York and Ontario. Framing the story is the modern-day discovery of ceramics and human remains identified by one overweening archaeologist as Iroquoian—while an equally strong-minded female archaeologist calls them Algongkian, or Princess Point. Anyway, they date somewhere in the range of a.d. 500 to 1000. The novel proper tells of elderly tribal shaman Silver Sparrow’s failure to Dream and foresee a great raid by the Walksalong Villagers on Turtle Nation’s Paint Rock Village to kidnap the nine-year-old dwarf child Rumbler, known also as False Face Child—a very great Dreamer who can draw prophetic Power down from the skies and forecast major events. The murderous Jumping Badger leads the raid, kills the boy’s mother, burns Paint Rock Village to ashes, and carries the prophet child off to Wallksalong Village, which is part of the Bear Nation. The Bear Nation cultivates crops, lives in fortified villages of long-houses, and pushes against Turtle Nation, forcing them either to move or else blend their small-house villages with Bear-Turtle villages. When Jumping Badger’s warriors begin mysteriously dying, Rumbler, his hands tied together, is condemned to die on winter-whipped Lost Hill. Wren, a Walksalong girl three years older than he, helps him to escape into icy forests. But when Jumping Badger at last captures Wren . . . . Flowing imagination, storytelling marvels. The Gears have a fine time drawing the various interclan rivalries and clashes of cultures. (Satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-85857-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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
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
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