Fasten your seatbelt for an enjoyable flight of fancy told in a confessional voice by likable people.
When Angel is born with tiny flaps perched on her shoulder blades, her unwed teen mother ignores medical advice to surgically remove them—and the result of this decision brings unexpected glory and grief to mother and daughter and those that they love.
Quick-thinking survivor Allison, cast out by judgmental parents when they learn she is pregnant after a frat house gang rape, has her baby and names her Angel. The single mother eventually parlays her knack for numbers into a job as a CPA. She meets Mark Dennison, one of the fraternity boys, who agrees to a DNA test and helps Allison investigate the others, but Angel’s paternity remains a mystery. Allison falls in love with her co-worker, widower Charlie Evans, who already has a young son, Nicky. They marry and have another child, Shelby. Life becomes ordinary—except that as she grows up, little Angel manifests an obsession that begins as a fascination with winged fairies, moves to flying dinosaurs and then to her wings of her own. In school Angel learns to hide her wings, but when she hits puberty they start growing again. Sharing the perky “can-do” attitude of her mother, Angel turns her exotic looks into a six-figure underwear modeling contract. Actual flying becomes Angel’s true passion and the realization of her dream comes at a high price for everyone, especially her mother, who develops her own obsession after tragedy strikes. Told in the first person, initially by Allison and then at the end by those Angel loved the most, including the dashing Jack who joins the grown-up Angel in her flight goal, Kelly’s fast-paced novel takes the reader on a flight of fancy couched in realistic, straight-forward and graceful prose that makes the fantastic utterly believable. Logistics, physics, feathers and ambition combine to draw the reader into Angel’s world. It’s hard to stop reading this gracefully written novel and the only quibble possible is that the last letters and diary entries seem anticlimactic and work too hard to explain exactly how everything happened.
Fasten your seatbelt for an enjoyable flight of fancy told in a confessional voice by likable people.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615523064
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Flight Risk
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011
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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