by Chuck Palahniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2023
A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.
A pair of infantile, homicidal brothers decide to take over the family business.
Aiming Palahniuk’s profanely giddy rhetoric at the tea-and-crumpets crowd popularized by Downton Abbey and its ilk sounds like more fun than it turns out to be here. The book utterly unloads with both barrels in a sadistic folktale that aims to satirize homophobia, celebrity death culture, and the British class system all at once, but this much transgressive glee might be more than readers expect. To listen to their rhetoric at the beginning of this short novel, one might think Otto and Cecil really are the “twee, feeble, measly boys” they imagine themselves to be, complete with a nanny to bathe them and tuck them in at night in their manor in the Welsh countryside. It’s a different picture once you get past unreliable narrator Cecil’s flowery prose and realize the wee brothers are actually 20-something young men with a freakish, drug-addicted mother and a patently far-fetched predilection for rape, sodomy, and the lash. They also apparently have a future in the family business, where their grandfather Sir Richard supposedly manages the course of history. From Kent State to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis, we learn all these pivotal events were the result of the family trade —their mother responsible for flashing a strobe light in a Parisian tunnel, or their grandfather administering a phenobarbital and champagne enema to Judy Garland in 1969. “Those misdeeds that need doing,” as Cecil explains, include the deaths of figures like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and Diana, Princess of Wales, among others. If the history askew doesn’t grab you, by all means stay for the plethora of servant murders (“Then there was the year the maid got herself killed. Don’t ask me which”) or the rapists and killers Otto goads into visiting or the tutor Otto buggers so senseless that he gives himself over to the little bastards’ ministrations to make him more like them.
A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668021415
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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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