A nice start indeed: McNicholl writes in an easygoing, natural tone that’s neither manipulative nor sentimental and succeeds...
Amiable debut about a young man’s coming of age in 1970s Northern Ireland.
We’re in Ireland, all right, but it’s not exactly Frank McCourt territory: For one thing, the narrator is gay—or, rather, is becoming gay; 30 years ago homosexuality was still approached in a roundabout fashion in Ireland. Our hero is young Gabriel Harkin, the eldest of four children in a lower-middle class Catholic family living in a small village in Ulster. Somewhat dreamy and shy, Gabriel gets picked on at school, but he has plenty of friends and is far from an outcast, unlike his uncle Brendan, a missionary priest working in Kenya who never comes home and is spoken of with surprisingly little reverence by his family. Gabriel’s nemesis is Henry Lynch, a thuggish schoolmate who bullies him mercilessly for being a “sissy.” Just as bad in his own way is neighbor Noel, a somewhat older boy who takes Gabriel under his wing and “plays doctor” with him. By the time Gabriel gets to high school, he’s adept at cruising and leads more and more of a double life, dating girls and picking up boys almost simultaneously. His first serious girlfriend, Fiona McFarland, is the daughter of a well-to-do Protestant bigot. It is a star-crossed romance in more ways than one, and it leads Gabriel into a full-fledged identity crisis, which culminates with an astonishing discovery about his parents that also explains the cloud hanging over Uncle Brendan. At the close, Gabriel is setting off into the world just as unsure of his direction as before, but with very little fear of the future. The confusions to come are more obvious to us than to him, but such is the nature of youth.
A nice start indeed: McNicholl writes in an easygoing, natural tone that’s neither manipulative nor sentimental and succeeds in conveying the real innocence of childhood as it invades maturity.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59315-018-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CDS Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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