Allie’s journey will charm Christian audiences looking for a sweet, faith-bolstering romance, if they can forgive some...
Allie starts life with her aunt and uncle in the middle of the woods, and after years of tumult, finally begins to find joy, friendship, and maybe love when she opens her heart to God and her enormous potential as an artist.
Allison Cooper lives with her Aunt Harriet and Uncle Deb in the woods. Uncle Deb is an extremely conservative veteran who suffers from PTSD. He loves Allie but is also harsh and domineering. When Allie is diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, her school recommends a less isolated life—advice Deb ignores, leaving Allie to spend hours alone in the forest developing a natural artistic talent by painting woodland creatures. Bullied at school, she makes one friend, George, and wins a prestigious art contest that leads to a scholarship. Before she leaves, her uncle dies, so she and Harriet move to Chicago to live with mean, miserly Trag, Harriet’s stepfather. Allie is relieved to leave for a Denver art school and get a fresh start, but God has a few more surprises. The school is a huge disappointment, but she is taken in by a friendly family who owns a gallery and thinks she may be falling in love with their son, David. Meanwhile her art gets noticed in other places, especially thanks to her childhood friend, George, who makes her question what true love looks like and if, perhaps, it’s George, not David, who deserves her heart. Author Wittlif presents an interesting and compelling character in Allie and weaves a message of God’s love and protection into a story full of angst and roller-coaster highs and lows. Unfortunately, though, the simplistic writing style and naïve worldview blunt the drama of the narrative. (Does anyone in this world ask questions or do research? Do gallery owners just walk out and leave someone they barely know alone in their shop? etc.) Huge things happen, but Allie barely reacts before she’s dealing with the next windfall or tragedy, and the continuous references to God as caretaker make that concept feel somewhat derivative and oversimplified, too.
Allie’s journey will charm Christian audiences looking for a sweet, faith-bolstering romance, if they can forgive some amateurish flaws in the writing and storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63161-054-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: TCK Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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