An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.
This riveting mystery unlocks the secrets of a husband and father’s supposed suicide.
Stone’s debut novel takes readers down South, where a broken family tries to make peace with their recent loss. Sally Mason and her troubled 13-year-old son, Colton, have been reeling since Sally’s husband, Jack, died. The coroner declares Jack’s death a suicide, creating a sharper, more personal pain. Sally becomes determined to find the truth behind her husband's mysterious death, hoping that a changed verdict will ease her son’s mind and put a stop to his acting out. She begins with Jack’s appointment book and is surprised to discover little secrets hidden there, such as several references to Sally’s father, whom she hasn’t spoken to in 15 years. Her curiosity piqued, Sally enlists the help of her father-in-law but is met with his fury and a fiery insistence that she leave things alone. Determined to see what secrets Jack kept hidden from her but seemed to share with others, Sally looks into the meetings Jack jotted down involving her father, centered, she suspects, on a covert business deal. Sally is reluctant to be back in contact with her estranged father, but soon the clues point to an underhanded scheme set up among him, Jack and Jack’s father and involving a property acquisition that should have belonged to Jack. As Sally unearths tales of staggering debts, familial betrayal and lies, she discovers what the cost of truth and how deeply her mother’s love runs. With candor, sensitivity and suspense, this novel weaves together elements of mystery and emotion. Sally’s quest and determination to help her son serve as the catalysts for a host of exciting events. Her dynamic character and the many people she encounters while piecing together her husband’s death—and life—prove to be memorable and well-sketched.
An exciting read that shines a light on the secret layers that can exist between two people who think they know each other.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938749025
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Violet Crown Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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