A fascinating tale that’s held back by monotonous storytelling.
Against the dramatic backdrop of McCarthyism and the civil rights movement, a young Finnish woman living in the Midwest discovers the truth about her family while hiding her own secrets.
In 1983, shy, quiet 14-year-old Danny arrives home from his Wisconsin school and discovers that Lempi, his mother, has committed suicide. As he and his father, Toivo, mourn, he discovers an old newspaper photo of his parents from the 1967 Milwaukee riots and wonders what secrets lie in their seemingly innocuous past. Thus begins debut author Frahmann’s epic, globe-spanning work of historical fiction that follows the lives of Finnish family members who struggle to right the world’s wrongs and encounter heartbreak along the way. The story flashes back to Lempi’s fury-soaked youth, filled with Vietnam War protests and anger at the FBI for terrorizing her own mother into killing herself. Pauline, a university administrator who takes Lempi under her wing, encourages the girl to marry sweet, laid-back Toivo, but even after marriage and a baby, Lempi continues to fight for what she believes in, with catastrophic results. Pauline’s interest in Lempi turns out to be quite personal: She is Lempi’s biological mother, a secret that has burdened her for decades. The story unfolds, revealing more about Risto—Lempi’s biological father, who left his homeland to work in Russia—as well as Eero, Lempi’s adoptive father, who remains haunted by the losses in his own life. Frahmann’s story is an ambitious one, and his characters—especially Pauline—are intriguing. However, the book has a lackluster tone that never quite springs to life, with passages that feel a bit too didactic to be engaging: “Pauline also introduced Lempi to the real Milwaukee—a city filled with hard-working, middle-class people who built things and came home each night to modest homes that were well kept and near leafy parks.” Dialogue struggles to balance realistic conversations with historical information, making the characters sound stilted. Overall, it’s a solid effort but one that might not be engaging enough to appeal to a wide audience.
A fascinating tale that’s held back by monotonous storytelling.Pub Date: July 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692236482
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Loon Town Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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