A romantic young girl believably grows into a remarkable young woman seasoned by life’s unexpected pitfalls in this dramatic...
In Varrasso’s debut coming-of-age novel, a young woman struggles with faith, family and love while pursuing her medical degree.
Chiara Lazzaro, one of three daughters, lives near Pittsburgh on a large estate built by her Italian immigrant father. Born into a wealthy family, Chiara remains well-grounded and humble. Her hardworking parents, owners of a chain of restaurants, impress upon their daughters the value of education. Chiara’s father, Gian Carlo, is particularly adamant that his daughters not follow in his footsteps by working in restaurants. His dream is for them to obtain college degrees for professional careers, and his daughters must swear they’ll finish their education before marrying. After a traumatic incident with the parish priest, Chiara abandons her family’s faith in God and turns to science, which eventually leads to her entering medical school. Still a romantic, she falls in love and marries Adrian, a professional baseball player, despite her father’s strong disapproval. The upheaval continues for Chiara after her husband is traded to another team, leaving her to cope with her father’s heart attack, her difficult mother-in-law and a series of harassing phone calls from an anonymous woman claiming to be her husband’s lover. As her medical school grades begin to slip and her marriage fractures from the stress of doubt and the ongoing assault from the mystery woman, Chiara returns to her family for healing and support. With her confidence restored, Chiara is able to make the tough decisions that will preserve her identity and her future. In the fast-moving plot, Varrasso keeps the focus firmly on Chiara, though there are moments when other themes intrude. The oldest daughter’s struggles with fertility and the youngest daughter’s revelation of her sexual identity, for example, lead to some clumsy dialogue that adds little to Chiara’s personal journey. Regardless, the story is filled with likable, believable characters, and Varrasso deftly balances their flaws with redemptive qualities so that even Adrian’s domineering mother remains sympathetically human.
A romantic young girl believably grows into a remarkable young woman seasoned by life’s unexpected pitfalls in this dramatic story of love and family.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615715841
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Christina Varrasso
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2013
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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