A story of catastrophic loss that fails to stand out from the crowded field of books on grief.
A woman mourning the losses of her husband and young daughter goes on a cross-country road trip to rediscover her faith.
Kuder’s debut novel tells the story of Ali Berg, who has just suffered the losses of her husband, Isaac, and their teenage daughter, Zoe, in a car accident. Supported by her loving parents and siblings, Ali decides to go on a road trip to meet up with people from her past she is grateful for, hoping that the journey will help her remember what makes her life worth continuing. The novel also cuts from Ali’s present journey to her past with Isaac and Zoe, demonstrating the imperfect but ultimately loving nature of their relationship. Kuder has crafted a meaningful exploration into some of the difficulties of grief and a brave protagonist whom readers can root for as she travels. Unfortunately, though, many of the characters resemble mouthpieces for specific philosophies and perspectives on grieving more than fully developed people. For example, Ali’s friend Gwen embarks on an extended discussion of positive thinking when they first meet, saying, “I believe we each create our own reality….My world, my life, is whatever I believe it to be.” The dialogue, rather than representing realistic conversations, takes on a didactic, moralizing tone. The idea of going on a soul-searching road trip to meet people who were important in the past is an engaging one, yet so many pages are spent on people whom the reader hasn’t met before that incidents tend to blend together. What’s more, a character who serves as a potential love interest for Ali doesn’t actually get to appear or speak in the novel, a missed opportunity to get to know someone who might have helped her move on. While the premise of the novel is full of heart, it has too few three-dimensional characters to truly come to life.
A story of catastrophic loss that fails to stand out from the crowded field of books on grief.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615925233
Page Count: 338
Publisher: The Telltale Scribe
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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