by Claire King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2013
Hampered by a limited perspective, though well-written and sometimes quite moving.
Technically accomplished debut chronicles a difficult summer in the south of France from the point of view of a lonely 5-year-old.
Her English-born mother named her Peony, her French father called her Pivoine, but her nickname—Pea—seems most appropriate for this little girl tightly enclosed in a pod of her own anxieties and imaginings. She has few reasons for cheer, we learn in the opening pages of her artless narration. Last summer, “Maman came back from the hospital…changed from fat to thin, but she didn’t bring back the baby like she promised.” This past spring, shortly after Maman got pregnant again, Papa died in a freak accident; “he was driving his tractor on a hill and he fell off it and was squashed.” Reeling from her losses, feeling isolated and unwelcome in this small French community—Papa’s mother, Mami Lafont, openly wishes she would just go away—Maman now hardly ever leaves the house, or even her bedroom. Pea and her 4-year-old sister Margot are left to roam the countryside, attracting the attention of a kindly neighbor named Claude who has losses of his own to mourn. King accurately captures the speech rhythms and partial understandings of a small child as she unfolds the array of disasters large and small that befall Pea in the months before her brother Pablo is born; her descriptions of the French landscape and animals are exact and lovely. But as grown-up issues begin to loom large in the narrative, and as readers slowly sense that something is not quite right about Margot, the author’s decision to restrict us to Pea’s point of view comes to seem like a mistake. Revelations of adult complexities are couched in frustratingly simplistic language, and the resolution of Maman’s conflict with Mami Lafont, viewed through Pea’s eyes, lacks emotional depth.
Hampered by a limited perspective, though well-written and sometimes quite moving.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-944-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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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