by David La Piana ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2013
A uniquely American tale of the lasting impact of war, the power of friendship, and a fraught bond between father and son.
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In La Piana’s novel, the son of Italian immigrants struggles to understand his remote father while growing up in Los Angeles.
John Russo is an enigma to his only child, the narrator of La Piana’s first novel. Every day, Russo goes to a factory where he “loads endless cases of paint into living-room-sized trailers that are then pulled away by big diesels.” After work, he heads home, eats a meal with his in-laws, wife and son, and then collapses in front of the television before going to bed. Russo doesn’t beat his son—though many fathers do in Pico Rivera, east of East LA—but he also doesn’t engage with him at all. As the narrator finds his place in the neighborhood, he learns that his olive skin and immigrant family qualify him as “brown” rather than a “paddy.” He also tries to make sense of his father’s withdrawal from the world. In one instance—when Russo intervenes in a neighbor’s drunken attack on his wife—the narrator sees a spark of the man his father once was, but that light quickly fades. As a teenager, the narrator frequently brushes against criminality and death, losing one of his childhood friends in a shooting and himself almost dying from a stabbing. Miraculously, he survives high school and is accepted into college; he also learns about his father’s World War II experience in the Battle of Kasserine Pass, “one of the worst defeats of American arms in any war.” Although the narrator doesn’t make this discovery until college, La Piana’s novel alternates between the narrator’s coming of age and Russo’s harrowing battle to stay alive in North Africa. La Piana writes insightfully about the tense interplay of race, ethnicity and class in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, when describing the neighborhood’s reaction to a gay couple, the narrator observes: “In poor neighborhoods people tend to use impolite terms for groups of people, like queer, paddy, or nigger, but they also tend to treat individual people from those groups like they treat everybody else. Middle class folks, on the other hand, know better than to call people names, but they also tend, inadvertently of course, to avoid people who are different from themselves.” La Piana’s characters are similarly nuanced for the most part, although his choice to highlight Russo’s accent using nonstandard spellings such as “dey” and “dem” can distract from the damage caused by his experiences in the war.
A uniquely American tale of the lasting impact of war, the power of friendship, and a fraught bond between father and son.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492965329
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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