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SACRED DUST

A passionate first novel about racial injustice, corrosive secrets, and the unexpected resilience of the hard-pressed. Rose of Sharon is, as the story begins, without much hope: Her only child has died; her abusive husband, Darnell, spends most of his time ranting about black conspiracies; and her ancient mother is withdrawing into reveries of the past. When Darnell and his Klan cronies kill a black man who has had the temerity to go fishing repeatedly in their all-white Alabama county (it's the 1980s, but in Prince George County it might as well be the 1940s), Rose does nothing, until she is challenged by a newcomer, the brash, free- spirited Lily. Also harassed by an abusive husband, Lily—who's critical of the sheriff's investigation of the murder—leaves him and takes a lover, an activist who has come to the area to open an alternative school. When tragedy overtakes Lily, Rose finally finds the strength to leave her own husband and speak out, defying her community for the sake of justice. Hill deftly weaves together a number of subplots, among them the long history of racial violence in the county, going back to ``the Trouble'' in 1914, when the white residents drove the entire black population out, burning down homes and killing those who fought back. A series of figures, including the bright, reticent Rose, the audacious Lily, their violent husbands, an elderly black minister whose parents had once lived in the county, and a decent young white man whose religious faith (vividly rendered) moves him to expose the county's bloody history and challenge its beliefs, narrate the action. The voices occasionally slip into a sameness, and they seem at times a bit too rhetorically charged to be entirely believable. Nonetheless, Hill is a deft storyteller: He keeps the story moving propulsively forward and offers a climactic battle for justice that is stirring and persuasive. And in Rose he has created an iconoclastic, moving heroine.

Pub Date: June 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-31534-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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