by Dave DiGrazie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2011
A thoughtful, charming story of transformation and self-knowledge.
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A group of strangers traveling through a surreal afterlife learn about themselves and each other as they seek a mysterious man named Von Lagerhaus.
One minute Rawanzel Johnson was in a Buffalo, N.Y., crack house, getting high, the next she was shivering next to a two-lane road in the middle of a mysterious pine forest. Soon she runs into Karen, a pretty television journalist from North Carolina who says that moments ago she’d run a red light and somehow ended up in the woods. The two find a note on the ground from someone named “G. Von Lagerhaus” welcoming them and urging them to keep walking. Soon they meet more people—a reformed gangster rapper named Terry Twinkle and his spiritual advisor Professor Raymond McDermott, who were struck by lightning while playing a round of golf, and two senior citizens, Lou and Winnie, who died old but were made young again upon arriving in the woods. Together, the group follows the instructions left sporadically by Von Lagerhaus, who always seems to be just on the verge of arriving with all the answers. Meanwhile, as they travel, they develop powerful connections, and occasional conflicts, with one another and discover new, surprising things about themselves. Told in straightforward prose and with a charmingly goofy sense of humor, this novel is short on plot and long on character development. The author creates a wide range of characters and gives them life, only occasionally lapsing into broad cliché. He also displays knowledge of both Eastern and Western thought, and effectively weaves these ideas into the narrative without sounding like he’s teaching Philosophy 101. While some characters are better developed than others, those that are done well feel real, and while several loose ends remain dangling by the end, this is in keeping with the dreamlike nature of the rest of the novel and in no way detracts from the enjoyment.
A thoughtful, charming story of transformation and self-knowledge.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984003600
Page Count: 199
Publisher: Wine Flash
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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