A labyrinth of stories made coherent with astute writing and a capable, authentic lead.
In Taylor’s (The Antelope Play, 2013, etc.) third legal thriller featuring Donnie Ray Cuinn, the Texas lawyer’s mother and adoptive father may have been schemed out of money by an old friend.
Don hasn’t been pals with Wesley Bird since the former all-American football player betrayed Don for his own political gain. But Wesley’s latest venture may be even worse: he’s convinced Don’s parents, professor Ralph Rothschild and Dorrie Louise, to invest in a (most likely) fraudulent land development deal. Unfortunately, Ralph has persuaded others at the Cartwright House, a retirement home where he’s staying, to invest as well. Don works to get everyone’s money returned, while also helping ensure that the H.H. Company doesn’t sell a tract of land—the Hieronymus Parcel, which neighbors the Cartwright House—for commercial development. The novel has an unusual structure: the novel treats all subplots equally. Don’s parents are initially the focus: the story opens with the Ralph-chaired group Save The Chimps trying to shut down the Primate Preserve on the Hieronymus Parcel. But Don can’t devote himself entirely to Ralph and Dorrie Louise; his office, which is barely making ends meet, is also handling difficult discrimination cases, and he just reignited a relationship with attorney Anna Kaye Nordstrom. Taylor’s approach works, however, by fueling the story with a fast pace and an obstacle-laden protagonist. The legal details ring true: Don is relegated to watching as the DA goes after Wesley for securities fraud and must hand off one of his cases to associate Wiley Franklin. His flaws, too, make him all the more intriguing; his romance with Anna Kaye, for one, may be doomed from the start, as he’s still pining over his late wife. Subplots receive excessive attention, including the convoluted legal back story to Don’s “errand man” Bobby Bill, but Taylor has fun with the entangled plot threads, providing clever and often unexpected resolutions, especially regarding Wesley’s shady deal.
A labyrinth of stories made coherent with astute writing and a capable, authentic lead.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9894707-1-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Katherine Brown Pres
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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