An entertaining fantasy that nicely balances some ghostly melodrama with whimsy, teen wish fulfillment, and coming-of-age...
Death is no barrier to lesbian love in this YA supernatural romance.
Cassie is a shy, bookish New Orleans junior high student who feels alienated from her churchy parents and almost everything that goes on in school, especially the crushes her classmates are constantly gushing about. Her only real friend is Gem, a girl who looks about 15 years old; likes to wear a Boy Scout shirt, green skirt, and fishnets; and has haunted Cassie’s house for the two decades or so since she was murdered there in 1969. The schoolgirl and the ghost become soul mates and talk about everything, including Gem’s history with a girl named Daze, her “Hellcat” lover in reform school before their relationship ended in blood and fire. Cassie and Gem eventually come out to each other. After Cassie enters high school, they kindle a passion that progresses from making out to sex that is fully carnal (though demurely described) despite Gem’s lack of corporeal substance. Alas, the world just won’t let them be. After she slashes a homophobic bully and tells unbelieving adults about Gem, Cassie is packed off to Chose People Ministries, a coercive Christian therapeutic group that specializes in curing kids of gay sexuality and ghost delusions. There, she is subjected to aversive electroconvulsive treatments while viewing Sapphic pornography and pictures of specters. Jannerson’s (Thanks for Nothing, 2018, etc.) winsome yarn handles its magical realism in a vivid but matter-of-fact, no-jump-scare fashion, with the only horrors being those of religious intolerance and psychiatric abuse. Her treatment of gay sexuality is likewise positive and nonspooky. She nicely evokes the visceral wrongness Cassie feels dancing with a boy—“As the song progressed, Mackey’s hands drifted lower, and a nauseous lump formed in my throat”—and the giddy rightness she feels with Gem. The author at times brings a little too much maturity to the story: 13-year-old Cassie sometimes sounds like a 24-year-old graduate student—“both the activity and the actual notes felt, in the end, disingenuous,” she sighs when kids sign her seventh grade yearbook—and the third act bogs down in mundane relationship issues as college proves a direr threat than electroconvulsive therapy to Cassie and Gem’s love. Still, Jannerson’s appealing characters, deft prose, and psychological insights will hold readers’ attention.
An entertaining fantasy that nicely balances some ghostly melodrama with whimsy, teen wish fulfillment, and coming-of-age lessons.Pub Date: June 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950412-89-1
Page Count: 229
Publisher: NineStar Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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