Traveling to a dreamlike realm, a man embarks on a difficult quest but may have trouble returning to reality in this novel.
Burt Higgins spends his post-retirement days alone in his Massachusetts home. His wife, Betty, a retired art teacher, is in New York studying for her MFA. One day, Burt lights a candle he bought in Prague, where the shopkeeper claimed the item was magical. A boy appears and says he’s Burt’s guide to take him wherever he wishes to travel. He chooses to go to “the source of despair,” apparently the origin of the “murky shadow” connected to the guide. In this other world, two children, Matthias and Hannah, mistake Burt, still in his bathrobe, for a wizard. He befriends them and their mother, Elizabeth. When someone later abducts one of the kids, Burt revises his mission—ending all despair—to include a rescue. This is possible, as the guide is the “scribe” of Burt’s story. But it means Burt will be part of this world and have a harder time returning to his own. Soon, he’s recalling memories of life with Betty and their two kids and questioning which world is the real one. Litwack (Along the Watchtower, 2018, etc.) doesn’t hide the possibility that Burt is dreaming. But there is definite mystery, as the protagonist suspects the realm he believed was real is actually a dream. This makes for intriguing dual worlds: The alternate one is often familiar (a family much like Burt’s) while the real world has fantasy elements (terrorists are cruel in the same way as storybook villains). Ultimately, the tale excels as a fantasy, with elements like portals and an enchanted sword, and as a drama, with breast-cancer survivor Betty having undergone a biopsy, its results unknown at the narrative’s start. But the author truly shines in more conceptual moments. Burt contemplates a version of the afterlife that is, essentially, a “forever dream” of accumulated, imagination-enhancing memories.
A keen and delightful multigenre tale about a hero grappling with two worlds.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62253-442-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Evolved Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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