A solid debut set in the demanding world of high school distance runners, lit with pathos and humor.
A ninth-grade distance runner learns the meanings of loyalty, compassion, brotherhood, and self-reliance in Kenley’s lively debut coming-of-age novel.
When ninth-grader Sherman Kindle joins the cross-country track team at Pennsgap High School in rural Indiana, he has many more questions than answers. Why is his profanity-prone coach, Joel Viddstein, sleeping on the floor of the wrestling room? (It turns out to be only one of many crises in the coach’s dysfunctional life.) Can Kindle possibly keep up with teammate Adam Keane, who can easily run two miles in 10 minutes and 32 seconds? Can he also compete with his own annoying identical twin, Hyter? The stakes mount as the season unfolds, as their lowly team, the Snapping Turtles, goes up against the Ridgeline Salukis, a team so strong that it runs eight miles to a meet, wins, then runs all the way back to its school. Perhaps worse, the coach obsesses over what he calls “the loins” and forbids his team from having any sex during the season. In a hilarious exchange, Hyter says that he needs to know if he can still masturbate five or six times a day; “Son,” the coach replies, “I’m amazed you even have the energy to stand.” Set in an era when mullets and big hair ruled, the story often sparkles with the unique humor of adolescent life. For example, when rough-hewn team captain and senior Jeff Slade asks Kindle to hook him up with a well-developed freshman girl, Kindle agrees reluctantly but worries that she’ll be hurt. To scare her off, he tells her that Slade will spank her, tie her up, and keep her as his sex slave in the back of his van. “Sold,” she says with a purr. However, the narrative does slow occasionally when describing running technicalities that will mainly appeal to other runners. Just as the grueling regimen strengthens his muscles, Kindle matures as a character as a result of weathering conflicts, and just as his character arc rises as the plot unwinds, the coach’s falls in counterpoint. In the end, Kindle, the team, and their coach share a well-earned moment of grace that readers will feel they deserve.
A solid debut set in the demanding world of high school distance runners, lit with pathos and humor.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940595-22-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: River's Edge Media
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2015
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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