A short but undeniably charming love story.
In this supernatural-tinged romance, a teenager on a Georgia farm falls hard for the unwelcome new girl in school—a Northerner.
In this novella, an elderly JB Straton in the town of Bulwark reminiscences about his dead wife, Ellie. The story takes readers back a half-century to the 1960s, when Ellie Bronson and her family are newcomers to Georgia. JB, a high school senior and the star linebacker on the football team, can’t stop thinking about the new female student, who’s a junior. He has a feeling, which his grandmother would have called “the Knowing,” that he and Ellie belong together. Despite his doubts that a Northerner would be interested in a boy living on a peanut farm, JB enters into a romantic relationship with Ellie. The two fall in love, but not everyone approves, such as Ellie’s brother, whose warning to stay away from his sister is decidedly unfriendly. Nevertheless, JB is later ecstatic that his athletic prowess offers him a chance to go to college. But Ellie is upset because it means the couple will be apart for years. She seems to cut off contact when JB is away, and it’s a long while before he learns what’s happened to her. This novella opens an eight-part anthology, each volume written by a different author—though all will be based on Lunden’s (Bulwark, 2018) preceding book. In this first installment, Lunden hints at the supernatural, like a woman in the present day claiming Ellie was a witch. But these intimations remain hazy and largely unexplained, including JB’s recurring dream of being on a Civil War battlefield with Ellie tending to his wounds. The engaging tale’s centerpiece is the teens’ romance, with a Southern setting the author masterfully captures. Ellie, for example, is an outsider to the seemingly isolated locals while JB sees his family as “dirt-poor”—since cultivating peanuts is “like farming dirt.” The unadorned prose and concise descriptions make for a quick read all the way to the bittersweet ending.
A short but undeniably charming love story.Pub Date: March 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947188-99-0
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Chelshire
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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