An extremely confident debut that’s face-paced and full of surprises.
Mackin’s debut novel is a detailed historical thriller with a familiar and compelling premise—a labyrinthine plot to kill Hitler.
In Mackin’s book, as early as 1934, a British special ops unit “has been working to put in place an agent capable of eliminating the present head of the German Reich….For the most part, private monies have funded the project. It has never been an official enterprise of His Majesty’s government.” But Churchill and Roosevelt are both in on it, as are some industrialists, members of the military, street thugs and numerous spies. Readers are introduced to an enormous cast of characters and their real and putative backgrounds beginning in the early 1900s, including scenes set in Gallipoli, Manhattan’s Yorkville, London mansions and the Belgian Congo. The conspirators were playing out a very long game: After selecting their assassin in 1934, the attempt isn’t launched until June 21, 1941, on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Russia, code-named Barbarossa. The historical environment is rich with factual embellishments. Readers are treated to imagined, in-depth conversations between Bormann, Himmler and Rommel, as well as Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. The expansive depth and breadth of Mackin’s historical knowledge enables him to incorporate competing German military strategies into this series of Byzantine plot twists. Nobody is who he purports to be, and relatively minor events ripple through the story and eventually gain significance. Despite its dense plotting, assumption of substantial World War II knowledge and its 500-plus pages, the book hums along at a brisk pace. Even with the total certainty that this long-planned assassination of Hitler will not be successful, the anticipation and excitement is palpable. Occasional awkward spots could be smoother, such as a 1937 meeting at a Madrid bar between a certain writer and a physician and his wife from New York: “My name is Ernest, Ernest Hemingway,” to which the wife responds, “We know your work. I’ve read A Farewell to Arms and loved it, especially Catherine Barkley, the nurse.”
An extremely confident debut that’s face-paced and full of surprises.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491207567
Page Count: 514
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 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
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
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