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
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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