Both haunted and haunting
A ghost story that twists urban legends with the identifiable struggles of a latchkey kid.
It’s the summer of 1979, and young Ray is thrilled when he and his mother, stepfather and three older brothers finally move out of the projects and into a converted duplex in Austin, Texas. The neighborhood has everything a kid could ask for, including a dirt lot where Ray and his friends build a tree house. Ray’s youngest brother, Richard, has a special gift for storytelling and the pair spend many an afternoon high in the branches, entertaining their friends. Soon Ray learns that a terrible fire destroyed the house that once stood on the empty lot, killing the family inside. Ray’s friends say the remains are still in the lot, buried in a hole that’s guarded by an angry spirit. To prove them wrong, Ray jumps in the hole—with disastrous results. A ghostly burn victim Ray calls Candle Face crawls out of the ground like the demonic girl of the 2004 film The Ring and into his bedroom, enacting a vendetta that’s reminiscent of the 2001 thriller The Grudge. This alone would send shivers down the spine of any kid who has ever chanted “Bloody Mary” in the bathroom mirror, but the horror of the book also lies in the real world. Ray’s overworked parents have little time to notice when Richard, a star student, begins losing interest in his schoolwork, or how Ray is often the victim of his older brothers’ bullying. Between a vengeful spirit and a family in crisis, if Ray is to make it out of his childhood alive, he’ll have to learn how to fight his own battles. Now a soldier facing deployment to Kosovo, a grown-up Ray narrates, offering hindsight and the occasional italicized foreshadowing. In a coming-of-age story that’s well paced and layered with emotion, Mills creates moments of true suspense through guileless prose as he unearths a family tragedy.
Both haunted and hauntingPub Date: April 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4500-7222-9
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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