Speculative idealism grounded by its real-world setting; a likable, modern-day parable.
A debut novel sees a girl coming to terms with the defining facial scar that has ruined her standing at school.
Eighth-grader Karina Morgan has a terrible scar on her forehead, the consequence of a childhood accident she can’t remember. Karina is smart, but the scar has made her life difficult. It creates a first impression that most people can’t move past. The cool girls at school bully her. The boy she’s into thinks she’s a freak. Karina has only one real friend, Mary Blair, and is resigned to being an outsider. One day, however, down by the creek, she discovers a secret cave fashioned just for her. She meets an old man—a “bleached-out, hippie Santa Claus”—who opens her mind to the concept of reincarnation. All of a sudden, Karina finds she can see people’s souls: the underlying character that is the product of past lives and which exists now in either harmony or conflict with each present life. Her new insights prove valuable. She sees how Mary is suffering from the residual angst of her previous life. Karina understands finally why her brothers are always fighting. She can help them; she can cause them to reconcile. But can she search through her own soul’s past? Can she face her own scars and heal herself? The author leads with a quote from Lewis Carroll, but while Karina’s experiences are in a measure fantastical, they lack the whimsy of Alice’s adventures. This may preclude Mann’s novel from becoming beloved, yet it also gives it a relevance that Carroll never had. Middle-grade and YA readers should identify with Karina, not just because of her scar and its consequences, but also for the maturity she shows and her fortitude in dealing with family and school life. In speech and action, all of the author’s characters seem drawn from life. The prose, though at times digressive, is clear. The story develops quickly enough and sufficiently to hold interest. One problem is that Karina’s journey (vis-à-vis reincarnation) strays somewhat from a plot-driven narrative and into more philosophical realms—almost to the point of proselytizing. Whether this strengthens or weakens the book, though, is perhaps a matter of taste. Regardless, Karina proves a memorable reading companion.
Speculative idealism grounded by its real-world setting; a likable, modern-day parable.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974267-39-2
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2018
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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