A first novel celebrates diversity and strong women with a plot that does a lot of heavy lifting to get the story off the ground. The author, a Maine resident, effectively evokes the novel's setting, the eastern coast of the state near Mount Desert Island, but her characters seem straight out of Central Casting. There's Blue, the narrator, part Passamaquoddy Indian and physically disabled; her photographer and designer father, also part Native American; her wonderfully wise grandfather, who lives on the reservation and teaches Blue the old ways; her warm African- American college roommate Daphne; Mrs. Francis, maker of traditional baskets; and lesbian Leonora, who translates books and raises goats. Each chapter of Blue's story is prefaced with a caption from one of the photographs her father obsessively continued taking from the day she was born. Blue had a twin sister Berry, who died shortly after birth, and for years the lonely Blue talks to an imaginary Berry, whom she thinks looks just like her. Meanwhile, her parents aren't much help: Her mother has never recovered from losing Berry, and her father, who plays down his Indian roots, feels guilty about the freak accident in which Blue lost an eye and the full use of one leg. Her only friend is her classmate Brian, a math geek. Blue learns to make baskets when she spends a summer with Grandpa after her parents separate. Then she's accepted into college, but an unlikely plot twist has her getting pregnant on prom night. She decides to have the baby, leaves school, and moves in with Grandpa, but doesn't experience true passion until she meets Leonora. That relationship both empowers Blue (she discovers that she has a true gift for basketmaking) and allows her to deal with a fresh succession of family tragedies. In all, an agenda-driven tale of concepts rather than characters, who, here, follow a script more than they do their heads and hearts.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18187-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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