A well-written historical novel that will entertain readers with its sharp, insightful observations.
Young’s (One Apple Tasted, 2008, etc.) novel traces an English family over 80 years and four generations, focusing mainly on its women’s tangled experiences of family life and motherhood.
After a prologue set in 1987, in which a teenage girl named Damson is raped in India, the novel begins in 1938 with 17-year-old Sarah, Damson’s grandmother. Energetic and determined, Sarah becomes a nurse, serving in France in World War II, and she and her husband, a doctor, later have a daughter, Melissa. In 1966, at the age of 18, Melissa meets Lord Mount-Hey, nicknamed “Munty.” The son of a greengrocer, Munty unexpectedly inherited his title at 13. He and Melissa marry and move into the dilapidated Castle Hey. Always subject to “glooms” and “giddy episodes,” Melissa becomes seriously troubled after the birth of her daughter, Damson, in 1968. Motherless since babyhood, Damson grows up independent and strong-minded; before starting medical school, she decides to take the aforementioned trip to India. She becomes pregnant as a result of the rape and decides to give the girl up for adoption. She later becomes a doctor, and 20 years later, she sees her daughter again—accidentally pregnant and asking Damson to take her baby. Damson’s decision results in the unraveling of many repressed family truths. Young shows a finely calibrated understanding of English class and gender differences and has a good sense of time and place. For example, when Munty first arrives at school after gaining his inheritance, he’s uneasy about fitting in, but his tuck hamper, bulging with food, erases all social boundaries: “His new friends seemed ravenous….Born just before or during the war, none of them had ever known anything other than rationing.” The book also effectively emphasizes the bonds, traps, and pleasures of motherhood. Sex itself seldom appeals, however, even to contemporary characters. Most seem to think of the act as something one does only to make babies and please men; a lack of it, therefore, isn’t seen as a loss. Damson, for example, avoids relationships after her rape, but “her subconscious nursery door was wide open and phantom babies streamed into her dreams.” That said, some plot elements are a bit too pat, as when Damson returns to India and confronts her rapist.
A well-written historical novel that will entertain readers with its sharp, insightful observations.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0993124808
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Keyes Ink
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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