Readers intrigued by Edwards’ internal struggles will enjoy following his investigation, though they may be bored by the...
From debut author George comes a novel about a scandal in the Catholic Church and a priest trusted to investigate it.
Father Edwards was a young priest when he met young Sister Frances, who was having trouble with her vocation. “Sister Frances preferred daydreaming to prayer” and “often broke the rule of silence by talking to other nuns while they tried to pray.” Straightlaced Father Edwards is called in to try and counsel Sister Frances, though the plan soon backfires as the two find themselves in love: “Each discovered an interior loneliness and a yearning for a deeper relationship unaware that the sweet wine of lust began fermenting in their veins.” Though Sister Frances decides to leave the church and return to her life as a woman named Constance, Father Edwards chooses to join the Navy as a chaplain. Twenty-five years pass; Edwards pursues his career in the Navy, while Constance, after a difficult start, becomes a lawyer. When Edwards retires from the Navy, the two end up reuniting in San Francisco. Edwards, still known for his no-nonsense attitude, is asked to investigate allegations of sexual abuse within the church. As a well-heeled bishop explains to Edwards of the alleged victim’s mother: “She doesn’t trust my staff or the pastor. She is more likely to trust someone like you, a retired naval officer.” So begins an investigation that involves coverups, sinister figures, and Edwards’ introspections on the loneliness of his profession—which is where the novel is at its best. “He could meditate on the cross, read the words of Jesus and pray for his friends….But, he had no intimate, human presence in his life, no one to touch, to talk with or listen to.” However, as the story paints an intriguing portrait of Edwards, it does so while other characters fall flat. Wicked diocesan attorney Radlee Cunningham—“like a Neanderthal when he gets cornered”— does all he can to settle with victims of sexual abuse. Meanwhile, blunt and skeptical Constance is always keen to point out: “These holy people are selfrighteous [sic] hypocrites.”
Readers intrigued by Edwards’ internal struggles will enjoy following his investigation, though they may be bored by the many supporting characters.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Book Baby
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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