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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
