by Chris Hannan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2008
A rib-tickling picaresque romp with a heart of gold that even a hellfire-and-damnation preacher would warm to. Don’t miss it.
A feisty 19-year-old prostitute narrates, and dominates, Scottish playwright Hannan’s adventurous first novel: a tale of America’s Wild West during the late-19th-century Silver Rush.
Pert, forthright Dol McQueen is one of the “flash-girls” who forsake the fleshpots of San Francisco to ply their trade in Nevada’s Virginia City, where men are rumored to be newly rich and ripe for plucking. En route, Dol is herself seduced by a blissful hit of liquid opium, illicitly acquired by a pimp named Pontius, who impulsively entrusts his stash to Dol for safekeeping. But Virginia City is no Shangri-La. Dol’s ingenuous and hard-bitten colleagues (hopeful Ness, depressive Cordelia, been-there-done-that Sadie et al.) keep falling for the wrong men (as does Dol herself, temporarily smitten with a one-armed, inconveniently married police chief). Gangs of hired thugs keep materializing, engaged to retrieve the fugitive opium and return it to the Chinese gang boss from whom Pontius stole it. (The efforts of Dol and her cohorts to elude their pursuers suggest a black-comic gloss on Cormac McCarthy’s doom-laden No Country for Old Men.) And there is the problem of Dol’s mother Isobel, a veteran hooker with a history of misbehavior that ought to have earned her a lifetime sexual license, and has produced an impressive number of gullible husbands (“Mama’s a pentagamist,” Dol sagely observes). Hannan evokes the rough-and-ready period in blistering detail, and creates a vivid gallery of misfits and eccentrics (the incorrigible Pontius is a particularly engaging slimeball). But his novel lives in the irresistible person and voice of Dol, a girl who knows her own weaknesses, and her worth (“…we generally earn more per diem than a senator, and our reputations are less spotted in the eyes of the public”).
A rib-tickling picaresque romp with a heart of gold that even a hellfire-and-damnation preacher would warm to. Don’t miss it.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-19983-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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