Lyrical, assured, heartbreaking.
An intelligent, original coming-of-age novel from the author of The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (2004) and Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (1994).
In the fall of 1975, Alison Glass moves from a working-class town to the tony suburb of Weston, Conn., where she begins junior high. Alison enjoys Kurt Vonnegut. Her lunches consist of health-food abominations concocted by her mother. She wears yellow plastic clogs, a floppy hat made of pink corduroy and a back brace. To say that she doesn’t fit into her new surroundings is an understatement. But Sheehan makes the wise and refreshing choice to not dwell on the indignities of junior high. Sensitive and perceptive, but not much given to self-pity, Alison is more bemused by the popular than desperate to join them. And she doesn’t need jocks and cheerleaders when she has Kate Hamilton. Beautiful, self-assured and quick with a devastating comeback, Kate transcends her school’s social scene, and her friendship protects Alison from the worst of its depredations. In any case, blonde girls in Shetland sweaters are nothing compared to the challenges Alison and Kate face at home. Alison’s scoliosis may require surgery—despite the brace, despite the New Age remedies her mother insists they try—and her parents’ marriage is falling apart. Kate’s situation is even more volatile: Her father, Tut, is a self-styled shaman and a sociopath given to cocaine-fueled rages. Sheehan’s depiction of Tut is typical of the way she creates all her characters. He’s clearly a monster—and his crushingly charismatic presence makes it more or less inevitable that this story will turn to tragedy—but he’s never a caricature. This is less loopy than the author’s previous work, but her language remains carefully off-kilter, gorgeously specific and shot through with unobtrusive wit. When she considers Kate’s hands for the first time, Alison thinks: “Her fingers were long and aristocratic, also a little red and chapped. They were the kind of fingers you’d expect on Joan of Arc or some other capable yet elegant heroine.”
Lyrical, assured, heartbreaking.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03767-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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