by Darian North ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 1995
North turns from hayseed legal intrigue (Criminal Seduction, 1993) to a push-those-buttons mystery that pits her young heroine against demons that seem to go back through her family tree practically to the dawn of time. Called away from an archeological dig in Guatemala by the news that her father is hospitalized in New York, forensic anthropologist Iris Lanier hasn't a clue why John Lanier ever bought a gun, left his California orchard, and ventured into Riverside Park in the dead of night wearing a wire, only to get shot in the face. As Iris stumbles to establish a routine with the grotesques in her father's apartment buildingethereal musician Isaac Brightman, law student Mitch Hanley, super Rich Andrettiand with Justine Kizmin, the no-nonsense detective on the case, and Nathan Kaliker, the enigmatic head of the foundation that sent her (and, it turns out, Det. Kizmin) to school, she's enmeshed in complications that seem to link five vastly different crimes: (1) the near-fatal assault on her father; (2) the disappearance years ago of her mother, long presumed dead; (3) a fatal terrorist bombing by a fringe group of 60's radicals; (4) the murder of a teenaged girl whose bones Iris reluctantly agrees to look at while she's waiting for her father to come out of his coma; and (5) the stabbing death of the Lady Moonsmoke, the wife of the Mayan Sun God, whose bones Iris was excavating in Guatemala. (Warning: at least one of these crimes turns out to have nothing to do with the others.) North (Criminal Seduction, 1993) pulls out all the stopsmultiplying threats to Iris, invoking wholesale conspiracies, etc.but the result is merely a lot of pulled-out stops, as Iris dashes from California to Atlantic City confronting figures from her family past who spew out secrets of dubious relevance before fading mercifully back into the woodwork. Sprawling, taxing (of time, patience, and belief), and finally exhausting, like a train that stops at every village between New York and Guatemala City. (First printing of 50,000; Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93849-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
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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