A disconcerting central character is adeptly balanced by a strong young girl likely to win readers’ hearts.
Huskins’ (Khan in Rasputin’s Shadow, 2009) latest thriller follows two kidnapped young sisters who find help from an unlikely source—a psychopathic serial killer.
A late-night excursion for groceries takes a dark turn for Kaley and Shannon, young siblings taken by a Russian group that deals in human trafficking. It seems that the only witness to the abduction, Spencer Pelletier, isn’t sticking around; a seasoned criminal and killer, he escaped from the Leavenworth federal penitentiary two years ago and would prefer avoiding the cops. While authorities search for the girls and Spencer, Kaley uses an ability her grandmother called “the charm” to develop a telepathic connection to Spencer. A disturbing man, Spencer behaves in twisted ways disclosed rather bluntly—particulars of his murders involve a rather uncomfortable amount of biting. He may make some readers squeamish, and he’s certainly hard to like when he’s gathering funds and false identification to continue hiding from police, all while two girls are being held captive. But Huskins smartly turns Spencer into a necessary evil: Kaley’s “charm” sets him on a path often reserved for heroes, and the kidnappers, whose vile deeds exclusively include children, are much worse. The true protagonist, however, and the story’s finest character, is 12-year-old Kaley. She’s a motherlike figure for her younger sister, Shannon—their real mother is a meth addict—and even to Bonetta, another abducted girl. Her initial encounter with Spencer at a local store is astonishing—they unnerve one another, her sensing that he’s a murderer, him believing she’s recognized him—and brilliantly establishes a bizarre alliance that’s maintained throughout the story. The novel sustains a high level of intensity, with the girls rarely being left alone and their captors moving them while keeping them under surveillance. It also teases Spencer’s past transgressions—namely an incident in Baton Rouge and what exactly happened to a schoolmate in the fifth grade. The inevitable confrontation between Spencer and the human traffickers may not be to everyone’s tastes, but its audacious over-the-top approach is certainly imaginative and not likely to be forgotten.
A disconcerting central character is adeptly balanced by a strong young girl likely to win readers’ hearts.Pub Date: April 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482064735
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2013
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 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
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