A buoyant, instructional, timely, and offbeat biography.
The life story of Mexican-American voter registration activist William “Willie” Cárdenas Velásquez Jr., told through fictional letters written by him—30 years after his death.
González (Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me?, 2009, etc.) draws upon her experience as a novelist to create an unusual account of his life, designed to educate and inspire older children and young teenagers. Narrator Velásquez tells his own story in the form of missives from beyond the grave to his mother, his wife, and beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, among others. He was born on May 9, 1944, in Orlando, Florida. When his father was shipped overseas soon after, his 18-year-old mother, Mary Louise, brought him back home to San Antonio, Texas. After graduating from that city’s St. Mary’s University, Velásquez originally planned to work as a diplomat in Washington, D.C.; he spent two summers working as an intern for U.S. Rep. Henry B. González (D-Texas). Then, on Labor Day, 1966, Velásquez’s passion was ignited by a farmworker’s protest in Austin. He realized that the key to dealing with problems affecting the Hispanic population in Texas—including flooding, lack of good jobs, and insufficient education—was to motivate Hispanics to register and vote for Hispanic representatives at all levels of government. In 1974, he helped found the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project; he died in 1988 at 44, credited with adding millions of Hispanics to the United States’ voter rolls. In 1995, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As presented by native Texan González, the letters—written from the beyond with the approval of “the Big One,” according to Velásquez—are breezy, sometimes humorous, and conversational in style. The narrator effectively speaks to young readers directly: “Life is about knowing that the world isn’t fair. And it’s not fair so that you and me can learn to make it fair, get that?” González celebrates Velásquez in this imaginative book in a way that aims to give Latino kids pride and hope, and it’s likely to engage young audiences.
A buoyant, instructional, timely, and offbeat biography.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-948955-01-0
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Auris Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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