A witty, modern voice delivers a captivating tale about a mysterious death that feels like a light read but soon submerges...
A mother questions her relationships with family and friends after classmates accuse her autistic son of murdering a student.
Levin (California Street, 1992, etc.) produces a partnership between doubt and guilt in the story of Anna Kagen and her son, a fourth-grader who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. When the novel opens, Anna is accompanying her son’s class on a field trip to Minotaur Island, a preserve nestled in the San Francisco Bay. Her son, Jack, entertains his classmates with his many Aspy party tricks, like calculating days of the week on which friends’ birthdays will fall in the distant future. All is going well until Anna decides to let Jack visit the bathroom on his own. Her misjudgment sets in motion a series of events that wreaks havoc on her family’s lives. After Jack fails to return from the bathroom, Anna realizes that not only her son, but also three other boys are missing. When the boys are located, one is dead. The other children blame Jack, claiming he pushed the student into a ditch in anger. Anna is sure her son couldn’t be the culprit, but the other parents disagree, and a modern-day witch hunt ensues. Complicating matters further, Jack’s father, Alex Kagen, is the district attorney for San Francisco, and this is an election year. Suddenly, his opponents are using his son’s predicament as a campaign tactic. Alex’s rankings begin slipping, and his already strained relationship with his wife starts to crumble to bits. As Anna scrambles to clear her son’s name and questions whether she wants to save her marriage, the author provides intriguing and gut-wrenching information about hostilities toward children with disabilities. Through her fast-paced prose, engaging plot, and sharp insights, Levin underscores how intolerance and ignorance can cause difficult situations to spiral out of control (When a teacher on the field trip finds out the boys are missing, she squawks: “I told the principal last fall that it was a mistake to keep that Kagen boy on!”). In a friendly, nearly conversational style reminiscent of Liane Moriarty, Levin covers everything from social-climbing PTA moms in contemporary suburbia to a complex love affair and corrupt practices in the nation’s penal system.
A witty, modern voice delivers a captivating tale about a mysterious death that feels like a light read but soon submerges the reader deep into the throes of substance.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9913274-6-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Chickadee Prince Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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