A book that offers happy but not believable endings.
Reverend Elsa Montgomery has turned away from God for the third time. Can she find her way back?
Multiple RITA award-winner O’Neal (How to Bake a Perfect Life, 2010, etc.) offers this warm, comfortingly predictable romance about the healing powers of nature, love and community. After tragedy strikes her Seattle-based church community, Reverend Elsa finds herself sinking into a deep depression, grieving not only the death of a parishioner but also her own faith. Tamsin, Elsa’s sister, is worried, her own congregation insists she take a sabbatical and her oldest friend, Joaquin, drags her back home to Pueblo. Years ago, Elsa and Joaquin had nearly married, but a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago had convinced him to become a priest. Now Joaquin, better known as Father Jack, plans to help Elsa heal by convincing her to spearhead a community garden in his impoverished parish. Yet both Elsa and Joaquin have some lingering feelings for each other to work through—feelings that can no longer be ignored when the ruggedly handsome (and tellingly named) Deacon McCoy turns up as the landscaping expert. Meanwhile Tamsin has troubles of her own. Her husband has disappeared, the feds have indicted him for financial shenanigans of international proportions and her daughter just might be engaged to an Italian count. Joaquin, Elsa, Deacon, Tamsin and the community come together to clear the land, plant seeds and nurture the garden that begins to heal all of their hurts. The forces of good in this novel are well developed through the ministries of Father Jack and Elsa, as well as the many communal acts of goodness, such as the soup kitchen, the quilting circle and the garden itself. Darkness looms with gangs intent on destroying the garden and the memories of what happened in Seattle. Yet those forces of evil offer only glancing blows.
A book that offers happy but not believable endings.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-38678-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
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
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