by Dennis McFarland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2007
A work to be savored: McFarland knows how to put words together in guileful and bewitching ways.
A novel of nuanced emotional complexity, with a refreshing emphasis on character rather than on post-modern angst.
Once again McFarland (Prince Edward, 2004, etc.) anatomizes family dynamics, this time through three adult siblings. Morris Owen and his sister Ellen have tried to escape their southern past first by attending boarding school in New England and later by moving to the Cape. Their wayward younger sister Bonnie, who’s tried a number of occupations and failed at all of them, has recently moved back to the manse in Alabama after the death of the family’s patriarch. The novel begins with a letter Bonnie has sent to Morris and Ellen informing them that she’s recently—and somewhat secretively—married a charismatic evangelical preacher, Pastor (his given name) Vandorpe, so the two elder siblings set out to visit their old home and take the measure of Bonnie’s new husband. This is no skewer-the-fundamentalist screed, however, for Pastor is presented as a committed yet questioning Christian, both bewildered and bewitched by Morris’s homosexuality. While at one level Pastor wants to “save” Morris, at another he’s learning about his own patronizing attitudes. Morris is both learned and witty, and he has little tolerance for Pastor’s evangelism, but he’s also fascinated by Pastor’s genuineness and sincerity, values far removed from his own cynicism. Meanwhile, Bonnie is caught in the middle, sympathetic both to her siblings’ questioning (which begins to move her away from her new husband) and to Pastor’s deep faith (which she occasionally runs afoul of). The novel builds up to a mystical vision that Pastor experiences—an enigmatic visitation of Jesus—that tests everyone.
A work to be savored: McFarland knows how to put words together in guileful and bewitching ways.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7766-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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