In Amyna’s debut thriller, a woman living alone in England has a perpetual feeling of being watched—and soon learns that she’s not simply paranoid.
Fiona Stark has been happy the last few weeks dating Rob McKay. The mere sight of him quickens her heartbeat, and he makes her feel safe whenever they’re together. But back at her house, she can’t escape the impression that someone’s constantly observing her. Unbeknownst to her, Justin Pitchford lurks outside her window, often sleeping in the woods near her home, and sometimes sneaking inside to watch her sleep. However, things aren’t what they seem: Justin believes he’s protecting Fiona from Rob. Sure enough, it turns out that Rob has a temper, and that he apparently doesn’t like Fiona’s cop friend, Jim. The situation escalates when Rob invites Fiona on a 10-day trip to Portugal, and Justin surreptitiously trails them out of the country. Amyna’s novel relies on drama just as much as suspense: Justin’s back story will likely garner readers’ sympathy, as he witnessed the murder of his mother’s cousin, who raised him; and in an unsettling sequence, Fiona is horrified by a clump of black hair in her tub—a sharp contrast to her own auburn locks. The author doesn’t bog down the story with a surplus of characters, keeping the count at a modest seven (which also includes Fiona’s pal and Jim’s girlfriend, Carmen), and she even minimizes the settings, staying mostly at Fiona’s house or in Portugal with Rob’s friends, Lester and Abby. The initial description of Justin is demonic and a bit too transparent: He has “uneven teeth,” a surname too close to the word “pitchfork” and is, at least for Fiona, an unseen, evil presence. That said, the author doesn’t define any of the characters superficially, and ultimately reveals more about Justin; similarly, Jim and Carmen have a well-developed relationship, and aren’t simply Fiona’s companions. Amyna’s grandest triumph, however, is her nonlinear narrative: It alternates between Fiona and Justin’s perspectives and frequently backtracks, aptly detailing alternate points of view of various events.
A short novel that engagingly retains all the essential ingredients of a thriller while keeping its plot uncomplicated.
Pub Date: July 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490498133
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
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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