Next book

TIME AND TIME AGAIN

Danvers writes erotic melodramas about people with bizarre secret selves. A werewolf was the protagonist of his striking debut (Wilderness, 1992); this much less successful second novel features reincarnated lovers who cross paths every century. Marion Mead is a respectable middle-aged Virginia woman with two stepchildren she adores (her husband is dead). She works for the Virginia Historical Society and is also writing a novel based on a 1769 newspaper account of one Susanna Grier, who absconded from her husband Robert's plantation with a convict named Anthony. Through her research, Marion meets Raymond Lord, a rich, handsome, middle-aged bachelor with a magnificent antebellum home. Raymond appears immediately smitten with Marion (``I've been waiting for the right woman''). He offers her a journal kept by Pearl, Susanna Grier's great-granddaughter, during her 1850 voyage to Oregon to meet Frank Strickland, the man she felt destined to marry after seeing his daguerreotype. Danvers now interweaves three stories: Marion's fictional account of Susanna, Pearl's journal, and the contemporary romance between Marion and Raymond, who has both the eyes and the photographic memory she had imagined for Anthony. These coincidences don't bother her, but she does become ``deeply and inexplicably afraid'' when she finds the names of her invented characters cropping up in Pearl's journal. Challenged, Raymond comes clean: He is the latest incarnation of Anthony/Frank, just as Marion is Susanna/Pearl, and he has been waiting 143 years to tell her his story. In the closing section, Marion experiences wild mood swings as she figures out how to stand by Raymond (who is now her lover) while avoiding the grim fates of Susanna/Pearl at the hands of Anthony/Frank. A creaky narrative, a lack of feeling for historical period, and an attachment to the clichÇs of the plantation novel are the most obvious flaws of this never believable novel.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-671-78800-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

Categories:
Close Quickview