Fresh, well-described setting and vibrant characters, with one or two missteps.
After his brother is shot execution style, a Caribbean teenager decides to investigate and clear his name in this YA novel.
On Barberry Hill, St. Kitts, social and economic differences are echoed in its topography. The mansions of the rich sit on the hilltop, while down below are shacks housing poor people and drug dealers. In between but closer to the top, 14-year-old Jaden lives with his brother, Rashid, who’s 16; his father; and grandmother. His mother has been working in America since he was 6, sending home barrels of gifts but never visiting. That is, until she has to return for Rashid’s funeral. He was shot in the head right outside his house in what everyone, including the police and Rashid’s father, assumes is gang violence. But Jaden doesn’t buy it. Rashid must have been unlucky. Seeing his mother again stirs up conflicting emotions in Jaden. With the help of his best friends, MJ and Stein, Jaden decides to prove his brother’s innocence of gang ties and restore his reputation. The friends risk beatings or worse to find the truth—which holds some surprises. Ottley-Mitchell (The Complete Collection of Chee Chee’s Adventures, 2017, etc.) has written other children’s and young-adult books set in the Caribbean, and she evokes her setting well, an unusual one for YA literature. She doesn’t shy away from the sometimes-harsh realities of Jaden’s St. Kitts, where gangs rule the school and seemingly “every day you heard about somebody getting gunned down.” She skillfully captures Jaden’s grief, anxiety, feelings of abandonment, fear, and other stormy emotions, as well as the rhythms of friendship and dialogue among teenage boys. Problems include repetition (Jaden’s mission gets stated too often for a short book) and a weak, clichéd motivation for Jaden’s father’s apparent lack of interest in pursuing Rashid’s murder.
Fresh, well-described setting and vibrant characters, with one or two missteps.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978900-2-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CaribbeanReads Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
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
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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