An admirable debut.
A death in the family haunts a mother and daughter.
When Sophie Bradshaw met tall, handsome plastic surgeon Thomas Logan (a Dr. McDreamy look-alike), she told him that her father had died of a heart attack just before her high school graduation; her mother died of cancer when she was 12. She had no siblings. The truth was far different, but for Sophie, marrying Thomas gave her “a fresh start, a clean slate....No one, she’d decided, would ever know her shame, or the scandal that had ripped apart a little girl’s fairy tale.” In her briskly paced debut novel, therapist and life coach Pisel brings Sophie to a crisis point: about to turn 30, she suspects that Thomas is having an affair. And even more shattering, she receives a letter from a lawyer that draws her back into the drama she desperately wanted to flee. Sophie’s mother, Grace, is alive, in prison awaiting execution for killing her infant son, William. She was convicted of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, in which a parent deliberately sickens a child in order to gain attention for herself. Grace’s lawyer believes she is innocent, but appeals have run out, and he hopes only to carry out Grace’s wish to reunite with her daughter before she dies. The ticking clock propels the narrative, told in alternating chapters by Grace herself and by a narrator who relates all of Sophie’s experiences and thoughts. Thomas is facing his own crisis: one of his patients—a little girl—dies after surgery, leaving him shaken and confused. “I’ve done this procedure multiple times, and I’ve never had a bad outcome,” he tells the girls’ parents. But the “outcome,” they remind him, was their daughter, and they decide to sue. Despite some predictable plot moves and stereotypical characters (Sophie calls her tony neighbors “the synthetics”), Pisel evokes sympathy for Sophie and Grace.
An admirable debut.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17636-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
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
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