An anxious, uneasy and despondent anti-romance novel.
Electra meets Lord Byron. Daphne meets Apollo. Insecure girl with eating disorder meets predatory teacher with dashed ambitions.
Woollett’s debut novel casts Laurel Marks as the brilliant yet underachieving, beautiful yet repressed protagonist. Her disturbed eyes view her voluptuous, free-spirited mother with horror and her frail, intellectually gifted father with reluctant reverence. Suffering from trigeminal neuralgia, her father’s passivity draws Laurel closer while his ardent love for her mother repels her. His early death leaves her feelings for him unresolved and eager to be rid of her mother. Consequently, she jumps at the chance to attend St. Cecelia’s Catholic School as a boarder, although she pockets a vial of her father’s opiates. Suicide insurance. Enter Hugh Steadman, Byronic, charismatic teacher of Romantic poetry. Married to a successful doctor and father to teenage twins, Steadman’s academic ambitions have dwindled from attending medical school to enticing barely mature young women. Soon, Steadman’s virility and Laurel’s desire for a new god figure have her manipulating her body language, changing her locker and wearing black bras under white blouses to attract his all-too-willing attention. Quite the schoolgirl, Laurel rejoices in every morsel of information gained: his first name, his birth date, his wardrobe. An unexpected visit from his wife to the classroom provokes Laurel’s interest and possessiveness. Laurel’s unrelenting focus on Steadman makes for an uncomfortable reading experience. She simultaneously desires and despises her sexuality; she both adores and deplores Steadman. Forced to see the train wreck through Laurel’s eyes, the reader cannot ignore her role in the affair. Nor can the reader ignore Laurel’s heartbreaking naïveté. Their flirtation ignites into a doomed affair, which both try to exalt onto a mythic scale. Sadly, their relationship is merely sordid.
An anxious, uneasy and despondent anti-romance novel.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57962-350-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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