A refreshing variety of characters in a low-key redemptive tale.
Four D.C. college students must face their own demons while fighting to save an inner-city community center in a first novel addressing the challenges faced by young black men.
Set in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood, where drug dealers are king, the story begins in the protagonists’ senior year at Highland University. Terrance Davidson, Brandon Bailey, Larry Whitaker, and Oscar “O.J.” Peters come from different backgrounds, but they share a commitment to preserving the Ellis Community Center, where they mentor neighborhood children. Raised by a grandmother who couldn’t prevent his younger brother from becoming a drug dealer, Terrance struggles to pay his fees. Larry wants to emulate Dad—a success at work and with women. Doctor’s son Brandon is bound for medical school and, scarred by a tragic first romance, has vowed to remain celibate until marriage, though he finds the choice to be a lonely one. O.J., a charismatic preacher like his father, cynically uses his gifts to seduce the young women who come to hear his sermons. When the Ellis Center loses its funding, the four friends successfully tap wealthy alumni to keep it open. But not everyone wants Ellis to remain alive. Drug dealer Nico Lane, who resents the center for turning potential colleagues and clients into good citizens, is involved in a crooked real-estate deal with a near-insolvent white developer and a has-been former politician and current Ellis trustee who needs money. As the students work to save Ellis, find new loves, and achieve greater self-knowledge, they’re threatened by Nico and his gang. Terrance loses his part-time job, O.J. is stabbed by a former girlfriend, and Larry’s race for student-council president is undone by false rumors. But these good and resourceful guys are soon fighting back in a vivid (if wordy) narrative slightly marred by an excess of brand-name mentions.
A refreshing variety of characters in a low-key redemptive tale.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-75772-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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