Perfect for the beach.
A Beverly Hills veterinarian goes south hoping to locate the mother who gave him up for adoption—but finds himself instead investigating a murder, a cover-up, and attempts on his own life.
Evoking the closeness of small-town life in DeClare, Oklahoma (epitomized by Teeve’s Place, a combined diner and pool hall owned and run by Teeve Narjo), bestselling Letts (Where the Heart Is, 1995, etc.) begins her third outing as handsome Dr. Mark Allbright arrives in town. Mark has just learned that he is adopted and that his mother was Gaylene Narjo, from DeClare, and he now wants to confront her and ask why she didn’t want him. But Gaylene, he learns, when he introduces himself to Teeve, was murdered 30 years ago and her son Nicky Jack, then ten-months-old, disappeared and was never seen again. The murder was attributed to a well-regarded African-American, Joe Dawson, who allegedly killed himself in jail. DeClare is a politically correct mix of good guys (Native Americans, a gay lawyer, a crusading anti-Republican journalist) and bad guys (a sadistic white sheriff, O Boy Daniels, a gun-nut, bigoted teachers) that may look good but makes for a blindingly unshaded story. As Mark reads Gaylene’s diary, he learns how she dreamed of becoming an artist and how, as a native Cherokee, she was angered by the bigotry she experienced at high school. He also learns that she was pregnant when she graduated, and no one knows who was responsible. With the help of Ivey, Teeve’s single and pregnant daughter, and of lawyer Hal Duchamp, Mark begins his search for Gaylene’s killer. Some of the locals, though, including O Boy Daniels and the radio station’s Arthur McFadden, aren’t happy about Mark’s continuing presence. Still, even when someone tries to take him out, Mark is not deterred. Eventually, of course, his amateur sleuthing pays off—and he even finds someone to love.
Perfect for the beach.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-52900-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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