An engaging tale of a contemporary Navajo girl’s connection to her horse and culture.
A blind Navajo teenager and her thoroughbred head to the Kentucky Derby.
In this debut novel, Moore introduces Victoria Jo Pinto, a blind high school junior living with her brother and grandfather on the Navajo reservation. After Victoria and her brother, Calvin, stop a stranger from beating a horse in a restaurant parking lot, they find themselves the owners of a thoroughbred who loses every race. The family spends time training the horse, now named Victory Jo after her new owner, and Calvin starts racing, slowly teaching the animal how to beat local competitors. Victoria also bonds with the horse, though a riding accident makes her reluctant to take the reins herself. As Victory Jo begins to show promise as a racehorse, Victoria decides to enter the thoroughbred in the Kentucky Derby. A collective fundraising effort both on the reservation and off supplies the entry fee, and a caravan of supporters helps escort Victory Jo to Kentucky, leading the Navajo Nation president to observe that “except for the forced march our people made in 1863, there have never been this many of our people away from home at the same time.” Will Victory Jo finally reach her potential in this Triple Crown race? Moore has lived on the Navajo reservation, and shows familiarity with both the physical environment and Navajo culture. (That experience does not always produce an authentic rendering of the culture; the use of “Medicine Man” instead of hataalii, when Navajo words are used in other instances, is grating.) The plot requires some suspension of disbelief, and readers familiar with horse racing will note liberties taken with the entry process. But Victoria is a compelling protagonist, balancing her heritage with the concerns of a typical teenager, and frequent but minor grammatical and punctuation errors (for example, “the Stalley’s”) do not keep the story from being an enjoyable one.
An engaging tale of a contemporary Navajo girl’s connection to her horse and culture.Pub Date: March 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5141-6301-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2016
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 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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