A solid historical novel with engaging characters.
In this novel, three African-American childhood friends try to reconnect many years later, with varying success.
In 1992, Camille Warren, a woman in her mid-40s, is feeling lonely, so she decides to get in touch with her two old Brooklyn friends Jewel Jamison and Saundra Farrell. Looking back on this reunion 20 years later in 2012, Camille remarks that “Time took us in different directions….Things were said that couldn’t be unsaid.” The book examines what went wrong, moving back and forth between the 1992 events and the trio’s earlier lives, tracing how they met, became friends, and then drifted apart after college. All have painful memories of childhood; Camille, for example, grew up with her grandmother because her mother was in jail for killing her father while driving drunk, and Saundra was sexually abused by a neighbor. The three girls went to college in the 1960s, experiencing the era’s growing political consciousness as well as new freedoms and challenges. By the time of the 1992 reunion brunch, Camille has become an assistant principal in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and a devoted single mother; Jewel has founded a prosperous entertainment agency; and Saundra is getting back on her feet after divorcing a violent man. Camille has a new romantic possibility, Coleman Barnes, a Marine recruiter, while Saundra makes an unexpected reconnection with Les, a white musician whom she’d dated in college. As for Jewel, she’s planning a June wedding, although the groom—who’s still married—doesn’t know this. Friedman (Ian’s Pet, 1991, etc.) writes a multilayered account of these three women’s lives that pays close attention to setting, character development, and history. Camille is particularly well-drawn, as when she’s shown to be thoughtfully indecisive about her relationship with Coleman. Engaging reflections on issues of race, such as interracial dating, give the novel a strong social underpinning. That said, it’s unfortunate that the novel seems to link Jewel’s growing paranoia, delusion, and sexual harassment of young men to her ambition—in contrast to Camille, who turns down a promotion in order to spend more time with her son.
A solid historical novel with engaging characters.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974638-59-8
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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