A touching coming-of-age story about a boy who has to deal with more troubles than any kid should.
A 12-year-old boy experiences the magic of first love while coping with serious family problems in this debut novel.
Joey Norton is growing up in San Diego in 1962, the height of the Leave It to Beaver era, but his home life includes its share of unconventional elements. His mother parades around the house nude, sometimes getting a little too close to Joey, which infuriates his sister. For his part, Joey sneaks out of the house at night to spy on a neighborhood girl through her bedroom window. He gets beaten up by her brother over the voyeurism, but that fails to deter him from playing at being a peeping Tom on a semiregular basis. The Nortons aren’t stereotypical free-spirited Southern Californians, though, but Southern Baptists, originally from Texas. On a trip to Texas to visit his grandmother, Joey meets Gloria, a second cousin, and their new relationship leaves him feeling pangs of desire and intense emotion: “It was too much goodness and beauty and stimulation and joy and the fulfillment of every dream of what having a girlfriend might mean.” Returning home, Joey pitches for the Little League baseball team, fends off his busybody mother and needling sister, and lives to secretly call Gloria at night. His dad, a bastion of stability and provider of advice, doesn’t have a great relationship with his wife, and an unexplained emergency that he rushes out to one night ends up being a fateful evening in devastating ways. Told from an adult perspective, the voice that Galyean gives Joey is at once romantic, nostalgic, self-effacing, and angry. The fairly adult subject matter is at times frank and disturbing, but the world the author creates for Joey is always rich with emotion and detail. From the stunningly confident older sister, Debbie, to the slamming front door at the grandmother’s house, the people and places are instantly familiar and exist in a complex, difficult world full of pain, insight, and beauty. The novel is somewhat overwritten; a slimmer version would have strengthened the work without undermining its many intricacies.
A touching coming-of-age story about a boy who has to deal with more troubles than any kid should.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4935-1119-8
Page Count: 466
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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