Few surprises yet discreetly intriguing.
In this Rickson’s engaging, if somewhat clichéd, debut novel, a young American man is separated from his German lover at the outbreak of World War II.
In 1939, with the Third Reich’s ascendancy well under way, Frank Eberhardt is sent to a chemical plant for work experience in Bremen, Germany. On arrival, the Pennsylvania-born student experiences Nazi brutality at street level, witnessing young men of the Hitler Youth harassing an old Jewish man adorned with the Star of David on his sleeve. In contrast, Frank also experiences the warmth and hospitality of the German people, and he soon falls in love with an 18-year-old German law student named Helga. When Europe goes to war, Frank is forced to return to America, where he joins the Air Force. He trains as a navigator on a Flying Fortress before being posted to England on his first tour of duty as America enters the war. Based in Norfolk, Frank takes part in many key bombing runs, where he witnesses the horror of seeing his fellow airmen maimed or killed. The novel also focuses on how Frank comes to terms with living in the unfamiliar surroundings of rural England, and how the locals perceive him off base. Despite courting the attention of English girls, Helga never leaves Frank’s mind. He wonders about her fate, imagining with jealousy that she may have married another man or, worse, been killed by the Allied bombing of Bremen. Becoming a respected and decorated airman, Frank is also involved in the rebuilding of Germany as the Third Reich falls. The “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” plotline is rather worn-out and may prove too predictable for some readers, especially because depictions of air raids lack dramatic intensity and the sex scenes rely too much on coyness. Nevertheless, this charismatic and well-paced novel will lure readers into caring about Frank and Helga’s fate. Furthermore, on account of his thorough research, the author succeeds in painting a fascinating picture of prewar Germany and wartime England.
Few surprises yet discreetly intriguing.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491881538
Page Count: 248
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2014
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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