A promising first effort—filled with strong characters—that shines despite its ponderous writing style.
A debut novel explores the past and present of a war-torn land and its leaders over the course of one night.
Violence has haunted Braeland for centuries, as different families and regions repeatedly clash in brutal battles punctuated by only tenuous periods of peace. The source of this unending conflict is religion. While most people live in accordance with sacred texts called the Way, which tell the stories of the two brothers Faedelin and Mehsani, the South sees the latter as their ultimate savior, while the North adores the former. The tale focuses on only one night and the tenuous attempt to sign a peace treaty that follows. Flashbacks explore the pasts of four main characters and connect their personal histories to their emotional and physical wounds. Jon Carrow, a Northern general, is unstable and traumatized after years of displacement and rejection, while his compatriot Payton Tallhart puts on a resolute public face as the soon-to-be-queen of Braeland. She quietly wrestles with memories of her turbulent youth and religious fanatic father. Payton maintains a close friendship with the thoughtful Jem Nalda, now a soldier for the South. Jem’s lover is Lanair Mavogar, reputedly the last living descendant of Mehsani and once the adoptive brother of Carrow. Alexander convincingly depicts a complex society riven with deep divisions while also creating fully realized characters whose relationships reflect both personal and political turbulence. The book’s major weakness is a tendency toward laborious writing. Though his characters, worldbuilding, and plot are all intriguing, Alexander often gets bogged down in overly long and complicated metaphors that explore his players’ mental states. These passages elucidate those states far less than sequences that describe these characters in plain language. The story’s many flashbacks sometimes become jarring, as the narrative intercuts between past and present with little indication. The highly complex histories of this sweeping world and the dynamic characters are examined over the entire course of the novel, so acquiring a full understanding requires patience and close reading.
A promising first effort—filled with strong characters—that shines despite its ponderous writing style.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-60414-4
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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