A colorful story of personal growth that ripens in Rio.
In her debut, Martins offers the warm story of a woman’s return to the homeland she left as a child.
Rita Ray doesn’t care for personal relationships. She’s single, 37 years old, with a lucrative banking career in Manhattan after a modest upbringing in Florida. Getting ahead in the business world is her sole focus, and she adopts a cold, distant manner to keep everyone, even family, at arm’s length. But when her mother, Maia, dies unexpectedly, Rita must confront the difficult past that closed her off emotionally. When Rita was 10, Maia suddenly uprooted her from their home in Brazil and brought her to the United States. Though Maia worked hard to create a better life for them both, their close relationship deteriorated because Maia refused to discuss their former life and the circumstances that forced her to flee from Brazil with Rita. After losing her mother without regaining the closeness they once shared, Rita plans a visit to Rio de Janeiro to learn more about her family and to reconnect with Maia’s dear friend Elisabete. In the beautiful, vibrant city, long-suppressed memories rush back to Rita—her heart thaws as she begins to appreciate the hard life Maia lived and the difficult choices she made with her daughter’s well-being in mind. Rita’s rediscovery of Brazil and her growing understanding of her mother provide the novel’s greatest pleasures, despite the sometimes melodramatic flashbacks. Immigration challenges and a compelling family dynamic would be absorbing enough without the over-the-top villainy of the men in their past. In Rio, Rita also meets Gabriel, a kind and handsome ex-lawyer turned health-food chef, who offers himself as her tour guide. The city opens up in its tropic splendor on the tours provided by Gabriel and Elisabete; its history and culture are enchanting. Throughout the often sensationalized plot, Rita—more than a tourist, but not a local—also explains the city’s lively customs, which flow naturally from the narration. Sun, fun and revelations in Rio provide Rita with a much-needed sense of place in the world her mother made for her.
A colorful story of personal growth that ripens in Rio.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466441798
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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