by David Domine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2016
An enjoyable memoir that will likely give readers goose bumps.
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A collection of real-life spooky tales of an old Kentucky neighborhood.
You know that a collection of paranormal tales is doing its job when you become just the tiniest bit reluctant to read it after dark. Technically, food writer Dominé’s (True Ghost Stories and Eerie Legends from America’s Most Haunted Neighborhood, 2014, etc.) memoir is more ghost-suggestive than ghost-specific—that is, no actual apparitions appear. Still, it may send tingles up readers’ spines. La Casa Fabulosa is the name that Dominé gave to a six-bedroom, three-story Victorian fixer-upper; he and his boyfriend moved into it in 1999. Located in a slowly gentrifying area of Louisville, his new home offered all sorts of fanciful period touches, including intertwining pillars and dragonlike gargoyles. It also had pictures that spontaneously fell from the walls and unexplained sounds of footsteps or an occasional moan. Dominé mostly opts for a rational view of the spooky goings-on—an old house settling or an electrical mishap caused by ancient wiring. But he still investigated the phenomena in ways that may seem foolhardy to readers who don’t like wandering alone in big, old houses. Soon, he was exploring the other oddities that abounded in his colorful neighborhood. The author eventually discovered the legend of the Witches’ Tree and met transient Romani people, drug addicts, cross-dressers, sewer-dwelling hoboes, a mysterious character called the Stick Witch, and an elusive voodoo queen. Dominé knows how to string readers along; he typically starts with something heard happening somewhere else: “One night, a strange metallic clanging and rattling woke me from a deep sleep around half past three. Ghosts?” The book’s biggest flaw, though, is that he doesn’t know when to stop. After the umpteenth event, readers may think that Dominé should have simply assumed that something “unexplained” was actually something mundane. Still, the author does so much so well that most readers won’t mind. Consider how much information (and tone) he packs into just one sentence: “I had read about documented cases of weirdness where strange things, including coal, frogs and strips of meat—such as during the famous ‘Kentucky Meat Shower’ of March 3, 1876—had fallen from the sky, and I now wondered if Widmer House was spitting things at me to get my attention.”
An enjoyable memoir that will likely give readers goose bumps.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-73466-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Myrtle & LaMere
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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