A very appealing debut from Dunbar, an Oklahoma native, whose tough-minded tenderness and authentic voice make the most of a...
Oklahoma psychic, in an impressive first from screenwriter Dunbar.
When her good-for-nothing husband Jimmy, a former all-state basketball player, walks out, Aletta Honor realizes she has no way to support her three children—especially not with a fourth on the way. But it’s 1976 and all over Okay County the nation’s bicentennial is being celebrated, along with Czech Day. Plan A: bake kolaches and sell them to parade-watchers. A few hours later, the house is filled with clouds of smoke. She can’t sell burnt pastry, and Plan B, lemonade at ten cents a cup, isn’t going to put food on the table. What next? Hang out a shingle that says “Psychic Reader—Drop-ins Welcome.” Aletta has had the ability to converse with ghosts and see the future lives of others since she was a young girl, though she was often mocked for her dreaminess. Her mother, a staunch member of the Burning Bush Battle Church, an evangelical sect that battles to save lost souls (Okay County is well-represented in this demographic), sure as hell won’t approve. But the desperate people who appear on Aletta’s doorstep are grateful for her help, especially in matters of the heart: Aletta can track down a straying husband and even predict whether the town tramp will find another sucker. And somehow, between readings, she still has to raise Sissy, Ruby, and Randy without their daddy. At the age of 34, handsome Jimmy Honor has gone middle-aged crazy and is fooling around with said tramp, not to mention tooling around in a red-white-and-blue painted van. How’d she ever get into this fix? Flashbacks to her childhood on a hardscrabble farm reveal her love for her father Clovis, who died too soon, and her difficult relationship with her judgmental mother. But life ain’t all bad, and there are a few small miracles in store for her yet. God works in mysterious ways—when He’s paying attention.
A very appealing debut from Dunbar, an Oklahoma native, whose tough-minded tenderness and authentic voice make the most of a slight plot.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46039-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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