An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.
In LaFrey’s somber debut novel, a young girl, her baby brother, and her “walking disaster” of a mother search for a new place to call home.
Young Rita only sees her mom, Coral, on Christmases and birthdays. She spends the rest of the year with her grandparents, who took her in after Coral—who wasted her teen years skipping school, partying, and serving a stint in juvenile detention—abandoned her newborn daughter and first husband. Rita’s grandmother proves to be an affectionate, stabilizing guardian, but her grandfather, scarred by a car accident, keeps the family on edge with his mood swings and physically abusive behavior. When Grandma dies, Coral returns to care for her daughter; she also has a new baby boy, Toby. After they’re evicted from their apartment, they wander from one makeshift home to another, including the basement of a distant great-aunt, a dilapidated former motel, and a low-income housing complex whose shady neighbors tempt Coral to return to her pot-smoking, promiscuous ways. That leaves the family “stuck in an old car with a half tank of gas, twenty bucks…and no place to go,” so they head west to Nevada to stay with Bart, a pen-pal whom Coral hopes will be her boyfriend. As told from Rita’s perspective, the book maintains an eerily detached tone that’s most effective when detailing the family’s cycle of abuse: “Right then, I was too happy to be very cautious around my mom, even though she had just punched me in the face several days earlier, over something she imagined I had done.” Other times, the prose takes too much time to say not quite enough. Too many adverb-laden sentences (“Abruptly, I sighed deeply before grudgingly making my way over to the fence”) slow down the narrative’s momentum and distract from its emotional center. The story ends rather suddenly, but LaFrey plans to continue the saga of Rita, Coral, and Toby in the next volume of her Fateful Consequences series.
An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480809086
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2015
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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