A darkly comedic story about loyalty, new beginnings, and the bonds created by shared experiences.
A woman has a vision of her life to come in Bailey’s debut novel.
When Ann Jones confides in her friend Alex that she’s seen into her own future, Alex worries that her friend is having a mental breakdown, and she writes a letter to her sister detailing the entirety of what Ann shared. Ann’s premonition begins with her arrival in the small East Coast town of Burrburgh. In her vision, her husband recently died unexpectedly, and she found herself with limited financial means and a desire to start fresh. A quick internet search leads her to purchase a home online, sight unseen. She finally travels across the country to move in, and she’s delighted with the house as well as the quaint little town where it sits. She’s further charmed when Freda, a woman from the neighborhood, invites her to join a local knitting club. The only downsides to the move are Ann’s inability to find employment and an aggressive car salesman who claims to know better which car will satisfy her. An offended Ann wants to vent her frustrations to the women in the knitting club, but she discovers that the group is very different than what she’d expected. In addition to some very strict rules about attendance, there’s a mysterious (and, it turns out, nefarious) undercurrent to the women’s conversations. Bailey makes sure that readers continuously wonder whether Burrburgh is as charming as it seems or if the knitting club is only the first of many reasons for Ann to be wary. Along the way, Bailey employs an accessible, almost conversational prose style, transforming what first appears to be a light romantic comedy into a thriller. Although there are moments of slapstick and laugh-out-loud humor throughout the tale, there’s also a grimmer undertone—a constant dread that Ann’s misgivings about her new home might actually be on the money.
A darkly comedic story about loyalty, new beginnings, and the bonds created by shared experiences.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-981820-36-8
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2018
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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