Gwen’s inferiority complex sets up a barrier to reader sympathy, in a tale at times delightfully intractable, though by end...
Cantankerous narrative of a girl in the logging country of the Pacific Northwest who chooses a tough way to deal with the death of her mother.
Gwen’s mother Althea was Columbia’s hairdresser, not well respected after setting aside her musical talent many years before for love of a transient Mexican, Gustavo Perez, who got her pregnant, then left town. His companion, Edgar Fuentes, however, stayed on, and Gwen, the product of her mother’s hapless love match, now 16, has had an affair with the older Edgar and finds herself pregnant—several months after her mother has died in a driving accident. Gwen works at a stable owned by the richest lady in town, Miz Hundy, and she now lives with Miz Hundy’s sister, the kindly and unmarried Mrs. Parker, who has also taken under her wing the recuperating “Leukemia Girl,” Lila Abernathy, in remission after chemotherapy in Portland and now trying to finish high-school in Columbia. Gwen and Lila dislike each other immensely: no-nonsense Gwen perceives Lila as a prettified social climber, while Lila is concerned only with avoiding germs and resurrecting her ballet career. The story is really the portrayal of an attempt at reconciliation—between these two young women of different social classes brought together through hardship, and between the girls and their town’s recognition of their rich individual talents. Second-novelist Koenig (Thumbelina, 1999) writes in Gwen’s hardy vernacular: the teenager is keenly aware of gossip about her mother and her, and is inured to it, yet she lacks the self-confidence to admit any emotional helpers, like the life-by-hard-knocks Miz Hundy; or the hunk at the hatchery, Dennis Bly, who fancies Gwen’s freewheeling ways; or even the dejected Edgar Fuentes, who truly loves her.
Gwen’s inferiority complex sets up a barrier to reader sympathy, in a tale at times delightfully intractable, though by end a hard nut to crack.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56947-391-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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