A heartwarming story that reminds us of the pure joy of believing in love.
When 54-year-old doctor Georgia Young learns that her college crush Raymond Strawberry has died unexpectedly, she decides to hunt up all the men she's loved in her life and tell them what they meant to her.
Georgia’s plan quickly becomes bigger than lost love: along the way she decides to quit her job as a successful optometrist, sell her house, and travel Canada by train to try to discover just what it is she's always wanted to do with her life. For Georgia, the trip will be "a long, meditative prayer” that “will help me not to worry about the end of my life but encourage me.” But the world is not always respectful of our dreams; and Georgia’s children and business partner—not to mention new and old loves—crash-land in her life with turmoil and drama of their own, forcing Georgia’s best laid plans to go awry. "We all take a path we thought we wanted to take, and then we find out there are other paths we can still explore," one of Georgia’s long-lost former lovers tells her toward the end of the novel. For Georgia, this means coming full circle to recognize what she has overlooked and realize the extent of her present happiness and talents. While some readers may stumble over Georgia’s attitude toward her children and grandchildren—ambivalence verging on coolness—as well as some key plot gaps and a somewhat uneven narrative that meanders as much as Georgia’s uncertain quest for something different, fans of McMillan (Who Asked You, 2013, etc.) will welcome this new addition to her oeuvre. Here is McMillan’s trademark style in full, feisty effect: strong, complicated female characters, energetic prose, and an entertaining, seductive narrative.
A heartwarming story that reminds us of the pure joy of believing in love.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90257-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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