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THE COLOR MIDNIGHT MADE

Name: THE COLOR MIDNIGHT MADE
Author: Andrew Winer
ISBN: 0-7434-3990-2

by Andrew Winer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2002

Well-crafted but directionless and unexceptional, becoming tedious in short order.

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An earnest if rather stiff debut describes a boy’s recollections of growing up in a mildly troubled San Francisco home.

Conrad Clay is solitary and somewhat lonely. An only child, he is used to being on his own, and his outsider status is revealed at school, where he’s one of the few white boys in an overwhelmingly black student body. He speaks black slang among his classmates, tries hard to think of himself as black, and hopes to convince his friends B.L.T. and Chocolate Chip that he’s not a “squid.” He doesn’t care for church, and sometimes skips it on Sundays. His father Ray is a welder at the Naval Station, a place that’s is gradually being shut down, and Ray knows it’s only a matter of time before he’ll be laid off. He drinks too much beer sometimes, which worries Conrad’s mother Jan. Conrad’s grandmother also lives with them; she misses her dead husband, has trouble getting along with Conrad’s mother, is sickly and very much afraid of death. Ray’s best friend at work is another welder named Moose, who is married to Lin and has a baby named Freddy. Eventually Conrad’s father loses his job, and money becomes tight. The family falls behind in rent but is saved from eviction because Conrad writes a nice letter to the landlord (who is very old and sick and lives in Florida) offering him his prize football card if he’ll give Conrad’s father some time to find another job. In the end, Conrad’s father moves to Virginia to work at the Navy Yard there, while Conrad stays back in San Francisco with his mother, who has a new job at a hospital in Oakland.

Well-crafted but directionless and unexceptional, becoming tedious in short order.

Pub Date: July 2, 2002

ISBN: 0-7434-3990-2

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.