Quirky family drama mixed with a Forrest Gumpish catchall of early ’60s pop culture: sure to entertain, if not enlighten.
Coming-of-age tale from Siddons (Low Country, 1998, etc.) set in the South circa 1961.
When 13-year-old Peyton MacKenzie chops off her pigtails, with predictably catastrophic results, her kindly father, a widowed lawyer (an Atticus Finch clone), decides to enlist a female relative to help his awkward daughter through the throes of puberty. And by great good fortune, his dead wife's cousin just happens to be passing through. The small town of Lytton, Georgia, is about to get all shook up by the young and lovely Nora Findlay, a self-taught expert on practically everything that was hot stuff in the early ’60s, from the books of J.D. Salinger to bongos. Wreathed in cigarette smoke and wearing sexily eccentric outfits hitherto unseen in the land of pink shirtwaists and towering bouffants, Nora soon has all of Lytton talking. She drives a pink Thunderbird (recklessly) and teaches the Twist, not to mention the high school's first integrated honors English class. With equal aplomb, Nora discusses literature and talks dirty to the farm boys who goggle at her, and her utter disdain for convention infuriates the local biddies. Eventually, Nora's airy disregard for the town's entrenched racism and Jim Crow laws land her—and Peyton—in big trouble. Which doesn't stop Peyton from worshipping her . . . until Nora's odd choice of subject matter for Peyton's school recitation backfires disastrously. Enraged, Peyton betrays a secret that Nora would just as soon keep. Siddons’s antiheroine is an original, but the rest of the story is remarkably similar in characterization and tone to Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, without that author's morbid genius. Still, Siddons's onrushing pace and whoop-de-do style have a charm all their own, and her loyal fans won't notice or care how much she borrows from other, better, books.
Quirky family drama mixed with a Forrest Gumpish catchall of early ’60s pop culture: sure to entertain, if not enlighten.Pub Date: July 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-017613-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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