A pleasant pastiche of teen sleuthing and coming-of-age gay romance.
In Maggiore’s (Love and Lechery at Albert Hall, 2018, etc.) YA mystery, a teenager’s summer vacation takes an unpleasant turn when she and her best friend (and secret crush) uncover an old murder.
In 1959, 15-year-old Pina Mazzini is staying in a forest cabin with her parents near an abandoned boys camp. While wandering the camp’s ruins, she suddenly has a disturbing vision of a bully taunting a younger boy that seems to end violently. She’s certain that she’s inherited her Sicilian grandmother’s ability to see the past and future, so she rushes to tell her friend Katie McGuilvry what she saw. They go in search of answers in the surrounding area; Katie finds a bone in the crafts cabin, she and Pina find a bloodstained shirt, and Pina and her father find a finger bone with a ring on it in a lake. Pina has more intense visions in which she sees teenage boys plotting the murder, and she eventually realizes that she and Katie are finding evidence of what might be a larger conspiracy. However, they can’t go to their parents about it, because Katie’s father might be involved; he went to that summer camp in his youth, and he has the same square tattoo as the boys in Pina’s visions. Then Katie’s father invites his old camp friends to visit. Meanwhile, Pina grapples with her romantic feelings toward Katie. Indeed, in this debut novel of a series, the narrative focuses mostly on the developing relationship between the two teens. The author’s tendency toward jokey dialogue can sometimes overwhelm the story, but the overall narrative effectively depicts their emotions of initial uncertainty and caring friendship. In the midst of this, however, the murder mystery doesn’t maintain very much of a sense of gravity, and the various clues all end up fitting together a bit too neatly. However, once Pina and Katie begin to see how the killing is connected to family members and friends, the book offers an engaging, suspenseful dynamic.
A pleasant pastiche of teen sleuthing and coming-of-age gay romance.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943353-77-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sapphire Books Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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