A suspenseful fantasy that delivers a richly layered, thought-provoking plot infused with messages about self-realization...
In this debut YA novel, the extraordinary truth behind the death of her mother kindles a teenager’s determination to claim her place in a world-threatening conflict between light and dark.
Odd things are happening around 13-year-old New Yorker Emerson Page, a girl who has suffered from severe anxiety since the death of her mother five years ago. The official cause of death is still unknown. The teen’s therapy dog, Friday, is her anchor; so is Columbia student Skylar, who stays with her when Emerson’s forensic linguist father is away. A trip to her favorite bookstore is the catalyst for puzzling events that begin with the gift of an old tome; the disturbing appearance of a part-metal, part-flesh woman named Cassandra; a howling storm; and a riot on the street under a sky “painted the color of chaos.” Indeed, mysteries and portentous happenings so abound that readers could well feel at sea if not for Avampato’s taut unveiling of a fantastical hidden world, where descendants of the nine Muses in Greek mythology must find a way to prevent the destruction of all human creative thoughts and endeavors by one of their own. Can Emerson be the key? The author takes her relatable heroine on a journey toward self-determination, strength of purpose, and the discovery of her own gifts of light and imagination. During Emerson’s odyssey, paintings come to life; books in a vast “Library of Imagination” represent nothing less than the lives of every creative mind on Earth, past and present; and the heroine faces the nightmare that is Cassandra’s dark world of “In-Between.” The multilayered plot and vivid prose amply illustrate the tale’s key themes: the importance of human imagination, the arts, and invention as well as the value in finding and sharing one’s light. But Avampato may want to reconsider her statement, in her otherwise inspirational note about why she wrote her work, that there are “almost no” YA books “in which a female protagonist takes control of her own life and destiny.” Among the wealth of such novels: Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper series, Catherine Linka’s A Girl Called Fearless, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.
A suspenseful fantasy that delivers a richly layered, thought-provoking plot infused with messages about self-realization and the significance of imagination and creativity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947486-00-3
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Thumbkin Prints
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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