by T.C. Boyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021
There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.
Farce meets tragedy and science meets show business in this romantic triangle featuring a student, a professor, and a chimpanzee.
There’s an antic energy to Boyle's latest which comes at the expense of character development. Aimee Villard is naïve and beautiful, a college student who recognizes how attractive she is because of her effect on men—and a certain chimpanzee. Yet she refuses to use her beauty to manipulate and thus provides this novel with its heart. She is a cliché of the innocent young coed when that term was used often and seemingly without condescension. Guy Schermerhorn is a professor who's deeply invested in researching the communicative possibilities between humankind and the simian world and who parlays that work into TV appearances. After his marriage falls apart, he falls in love, or lust, with Aimee, whom he's hired to help with his live-in chimpanzee. The chimp, named Sam, also falls in love with Aimee because of the same animal magnetism that attracts Guy. As the characters in this novel respond to animal urges and instincts, Sam emerges as the most complex. Short chapters written to capture his perspective alternate with longer ones that find his human enablers attempting to deal with whatever mischief he has made. And they alternate along different timelines, with Sam’s chapters often reflecting a near future that the humans have yet to experience. Sam can talk with sign language and understand, he responds to treats and to scolding, but he also learns to lie and scheme and manipulate, aping human behavior. As Sam and Guy compete for Aimee’s affection (which she shares with both), Aimee and Guy compete for Sam’s favor. And all of them must contend with another professor, a supervisor to whom Guy reports, who is some sort of alpha male. Or maybe God—to the animals, at least. Despite his domestication, Sam occasionally shows signs of being a wild animal. This can’t end well, and it doesn’t, as a comedy of manners takes a darker turn.
There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-305285-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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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National Book Award Finalist
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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