An enjoyable, earnest look at growing up.
Kroll’s debut novella offers a collection of vignettes about the bond between twins growing up in the late 1960s.
The story is framed as a series of reminiscences by Susie and Pete, fraternal twins spending Christmas at home in the present day. The only family member missing is their brother, Russell, which reminds Pete, the narrator of these tales, of the last Christmas that Russell missed, way back in 1969. Each chapter describes a game that Susie and Pete played in their youth, and how it affected their familial bond. Susie was the more popular of the twins—bold, brash, daring, and overwhelmingly kind—while Pete was more cautious, always getting Susie out of trouble. Nearly every chapter ends with a reaffirmation of Pete’s love for Susie. Supporting characters, such as Danny, a blind boy from the neighborhood whom Susie and Pete befriended, and Heidi, a German immigrant who moved in across the street, make nice counterparts to the twins. Chapters focusing on the twins’ letters to Russell, who was serving in Vietnam at the time, hit the right emotional notes and give the mostly breezy stories some depth. Kroll’s prose style is simple and colloquial, and he successfully re-creates the sincerity and naïveté of young children. A scene in which the twins pretend to fly to the moon and meet Neil Armstrong is particularly effective in this way; although it’s just a game, the feelings that the kids experience are very real. Other chapters, though, strain to extract lessons from the twins’ games, and wrap things up too quickly. The end of the story, as it returns to present day, similarly and neatly ties up all the loose ends. This doesn’t dampen the reading experience, however; overall, it’s a fun way for people who came of age in the ’60s to see a glimpse of their own childhood.
An enjoyable, earnest look at growing up.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9971111-0-1
Page Count: 92
Publisher: YardPlay Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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