An amusing, undemanding tale likely to warm readers’ hearts.
The grand opening of a Virginia bed-and-breakfast is the setting for Ball’s (High in Trial, 2013, etc.) latest novel full of comedy and sentiment.
This spinoff from the author’s Ladybug Farm series turns from best friends Bridget, Cici and Lindsay to their Shenandoah Valley neighbors, Paul and Derrick. The couple leaves the social whirl of Washington, D.C., behind and buys a bed-and-breakfast called the Hummingbird House. After much renovation, the two are just about ready to open—but are “now beginning to realize they had not entirely thought this through.” They have enough towels, but how will they get publicity and attract guests? Meanwhile, 97-year-old Annabelle wants her granddaughter Megan to take her on one last trip; she’s not sure of the destination, but she says that she’ll know it when she sees it. At the same time, Joshua Whitman, a young man with a past, is also on the road, trying to find someone. As Paul and Derrick deal with unexpected problems—and unexpected help, including a chiffon-draped spiritualist—they find that the Hummingbird House has the power to bring the right people together. Ball, who has written scores of novels in several genres, knows how to construct a plot, and the pieces of this one fit together handily. Many readers will find it satisfying and uplifting, although others may find its plot too pat. Similarly, many but not all readers will enjoy the book’s heavy emphasis on eating, drinking, interior decorating and gardening, as these well-described sections tend to put more emphasis on lifestyle than on relationships. The book shies away from being too contentious. Confederate soldiers, for example, are called “romantic….Perfectly respectable young men, land owners, classically educated,” but Southern slave-owning goes unmentioned. Also, Paul and Derrick never kiss, although they’re clearly a couple, and the word “gay” never appears. There are touches of real magic, however, including a particularly affecting, gnomish character who helps Josh.
An amusing, undemanding tale likely to warm readers’ hearts.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0985774837
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Blue Merle Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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