Overpowering dread and a leery protagonist make this a suspenseful read.
In Church’s debut thriller, a California schoolteacher’s search for her missing father in 1970s Barbados puts her in the middle of an ongoing fight over a much-desired piece of land.
When Drug Enforcement Administration agents show up at teacher Olivia Lassiter’s door, looking for her movie-producer dad, Del, she assumes that it’s related to drugs, due to Del’s constant association with the Hollywood crowd. Indeed, the agents claim that her father has a drug-running operation of his own and that he was recently spotted with her cousin, Aaron Law-Maddock, who was later found drowned—and whom she doesn’t even know. Olivia sees an agent swipe Del’s safe-deposit key, so she and her lawyer pal, Gail Kazarian, rush to the bank to get access to the safety-deposit box first. Inside are multiple surprises, including millions of dollars in bearer bonds and a birth certificate with Olivia’s birthdate but another name: Stella Harris. A couriered message from Del asks Olivia to take another key (from the box) to Perfidia, Barbados; then attorney Brendan Whitelaw, via phone, says that Del’s gone missing. She soon learns that Perfidia is heavily in debt and that the key to saving it may be the literal one that Olivia possesses. Soon, someone is following her and later accosts her and even sets her cabin on fire. Church manages, quite impressively, to maintain a sense of a hidden but perpetual threat. For example, most of the characters don’t provide straightforward answers to Olivia’s questions, which ultimately makes her wary of everyone. More than one man offers the possibility of romance, but these instances of tenderness are obscured by the constant, exhilarating atmosphere of distrust. Church’s indelible descriptions of Perfidia, meanwhile, turn even an innocuous cane field into something unnerving: “Dense foliage on either side of the path topped by the blackness of the sky created a tunnel alive with dappled shadows.” There are plenty of shocks throughout the story, including revelations about the land’s history and about a few characters’ relationships.
Overpowering dread and a leery protagonist make this a suspenseful read.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9983297-1-0
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Bodie Blue Books
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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