A melodramatic but unique tale of teen angst.
Munch’s debut YA novel depicts squabbles among adolescents at a school for special needs students.
Seventeen-year-old Pearl has a form of autism called pervasive developmental disorder; she also displays obsessive-compulsive traits and self-mutilates. Each day, she takes a state-funded cab to her alternative high school, where she endures the antics of her on-again, off-again friend Luke. He sings about stinky toes and has trouble controlling his violent urges—symptoms of his Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Their conditions make for a difficult friendship, especially when Luke meddles with Pearl’s relationship with her best friend Vicki, another student at their school. Gossip, bickering and back-stabbing are the norm in Pearl’s circle, in scenes that play out during rides to school and at parties, sleepovers and other places. Mostly, however, the drama unfolds on the phone; since the story takes place in 1995, landline phones and answering machines take center stage. Although typical teenage hormones inspire some of the conflicts, the characters’ developmental issues magnify the drama. The novel renders the action from Pearl’s point of view, and she doesn’t edit out many routine details. Readers may find that she seems unrealistically mature for her age, too self-aware and insightful; for instance, she explains that Vicki has “turbulent relationships” and is “overly dependent” on others because of the way she was raised by her “inconsistent” mother. Such observations are unlikely to come from a high schooler, but they do help readers understand how Pearl’s, Luke’s and Vicki’s conditions develop and manifest themselves in day-to-day life. This makes Munch’s novel particularly valuable, as there are few young-adult reads that feature such characters; students with pressured speech, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and epilepsy also make appearances.
A melodramatic but unique tale of teen angst.Pub Date: May 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482738506
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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