A satisfying first novel by Gee; perfect for the book-club circuit and beyond.
Another addition in the recent trend in popular fiction: Small groups of women improve their lives by engaging in a domestic comfort. This time it's bread making.
Julia and her small daughter Gracie find a gift on their doorstep—a plate of bread, a note and a bag of starter dough. Though Julia is not a baker, and has little interest in...life (more on that later), Gracie convinces her mother to follow the instructions and make Amish Friendship Bread. Part of the requirements are to split the bag of starter into three, bake one loaf for yourself and pass on the rest to someone else—a culinary chain letter. The novel traces the effect of the Friendship Bread on a small town, jumping from neighbor to neighbor, but focuses on a small group of women whose lives need mending. Julia’s son Josh died five years ago, and since then life is a daily struggle and her marriage is a mess; Hannah is soon to be divorced by her husband, a famous classical musician (as she once was before an injury); Madeline is struggling to run her tea shop and come to terms with the kind of stepmother she was; Edie is pregnant and is sure it will ruin her career as an investigative journalist; and, finally, Livvy is also expecting, but her husband has just lost his job, and her sister Julia won’t speak to her—she’s still blamed for Josh’s death. Gee admirably weaves the various lives together, linked more often than not by sadness and disappointment, and demonstrates that simple companionship is a powerful balm. The novel’s title, and even its conceit, promises a kind of homespun sappiness that the narrative thankfully avoids, delivering instead thoughtful portraits of women on the brink of finding better versions of themselves.
A satisfying first novel by Gee; perfect for the book-club circuit and beyond.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52534-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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