A light-handed affirmation of the power of love, faith, and community.
A collection of Mill River residents experiences heartache and triumph as the McAllister mansion is renovated into a bed-and-breakfast.
When Emily DiSanti, who's managing the renovation, agrees to have it completed in time for Claudia Simon and Kyle Hansen’s wedding reception, she doesn’t realize how stressful the job will be, but having made the promise, she's determined to keep it. Emily finds the romantic overtures of the town’s new police officer, Matt Campbell, unwelcome, but he soon becomes a friend and valuable partner in the McAllister project. She’s not looking for romance, even if Kyle and Claudia make a perfect couple and leave her feeling a little wistful. Even more distracting is the discovery of an ancient briefcase in a secret compartment Emily stumbles upon during the renovation; inside are decades-old letters revealing the tragic youth of Mill River’s elderly priest, Father Michael O’Brien, who was a teenager during the Great Depression. Beloved Father O'Brien seems to have gone through just about everything, and Emily is alternately amazed by his story and guilty for reading about it in secret. However, she can definitely see where his wisdom and compassion come from. His pastoral gifts are a true godsend to any number of Mill River residents, particularly Karen Cooper, whose husband has disappeared in Saudi Arabia. And despite his worthy work, Father O'Brien has some dark secrets of his own and at least one mystery buried in his past that might be solved when a young journalist writes an article about his long life and service. Chan continues her Mill River series with this layered and heartwarming novel that intertwines a number of engaging contemporary storylines and intersperses them with Father O'Brien’s moving Depression-era experiences, offering some fascinating insights and historical details along the way.
A light-handed affirmation of the power of love, faith, and community.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53824-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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