An often engaging romance/mystery with a hint of the otherworldly.
An ex-convict meets the daughter of a death-row inmate in Prettyman’s (Redesigning Emma, 2013) debut novel.
In Clam Harbor, Wash., Chloe Thomas masquerades as Chloe Gallagher to conceal her relation to her father, Calvery Thomas, a convicted murderer awaiting execution in Texas. Although she barely earns a living as a charter boat captain, she commits to paying a $1,000 fee to obtain her father’s ashes after his death, but she’s unsure where she’ll get the cash. Through an acquaintance, she meets Texan Duke Summers, who proposes that she help him smuggle shipments of alcohol north to sell to the Native Americans on Vancouver Island. Chloe reluctantly agrees, risking imprisonment while pocketing a grand every trip. Just before his scheduled execution date, Calvery tells fellow inmate Finn Tully that he’ll see him “in the thin places”—a reference to the intersection of this world with the next. When Finn is released from prison, he makes good on his promise to track down Calvery’s daughter, proclaim the man’s innocence and search for missing treasure. After Finn arrives in Clam Harbor, he and Chloe are instantly attracted to each other but also distracted by the circumstances that surrounded Calvery’s arrest and imprisonment. Although this solid novel’s title refers to locales close to the great beyond, it’s not particularly mystical save for one out-of-this-world scene near its end. The text is occasionally marred by missing quotation marks and inconsistent formatting, but, that said, the dialogue between Chloe and Finn rings true. Their story is refreshingly free of the sort of trumped-up incidents that often throw male and female leads together, and Prettyman intriguingly finds resonance in the fact that Chloe and Finn each harbor secrets.
An often engaging romance/mystery with a hint of the otherworldly.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615698854
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Diane Owens Prettyman
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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