A suspense tale set in a well-developed, if dark, world of hobos.
A debut thriller tells the story of two boys sucked into the underground kingdom of hobos.
In 1968, Glen Roylihan befriends Denny Grabolski, the new kid at school, even though he’s from the wrong side of the tracks. Denny shows Glenn the hobo camp outside of town, and both sixth-graders are intimidated by the men that they find there. Soon after, the boys are approached by a group of hobos led by Stosh “Due North” Grabolski, who turns out to be Denny’s estranged father. He’s come back to teach his son the code by which all hobos live. “Tramps and bums steal and cheat and worse,” says Due North. “Hobos are hard-working men and women drawn to a life on the move, on the tracks.” Denny goes with his father and learns all about flying from trains while evading the bulls (the railway police) and cinder dicks (railroad detectives). But before long, Due North “catches the westbound” (is killed) during an altercation with police—and the fault lies with psychotic hobos who obey no man’s law. Meanwhile, still at home, Glen gets a job at the local gas station with Allen “Socrates” Julien, a Korean War veteran who isn’t afraid to work outside the law in order to achieve justice. Each boy gets an unexpected education about how to walk the righteous path in dangerous times, which will come in handy when the two friends reunite in order to bring justice to the hobos responsible for Due North’s death. In his series opener, Biermeier writes in a clear, muscular prose that captures the gruff demeanors of his characters and their world: “Socrates had hopped the trains home from California after Korea and knew that the tracks hauled just as much bad as good. Many times he had witnessed the bums jumping to the hobo jungle no more than a quarter mile from his door.” The book is rife with violence and other disturbing material that the author does not, perhaps, handle with the proper weight. But the kingdom of hobos he imagines—as replete with White Hats and Black Hats as any Western—will surely be an attractive fantasy for some readers.
A suspense tale set in a well-developed, if dark, world of hobos.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5406-0557-3
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2018
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
