A poignant, thought-provoking love story on many levels.
Gideon and Alex overcome family and job stresses as well as their own biases and insecurities to find their way to a happy-ever-after.
Alex Henning, who's African-American, has had a crush on his sister’s white roommate, Gideon, for years, but to Alex, the brilliant computer geek is "way out of his league." When they meet again under less-than-perfect circumstances, Gideon doesn’t even recognize him, then proves himself to be a supercilious jerk. Probably a good thing, since Alex doesn’t have time for a social life anyway. With his father suffering from dementia, he’s had to work practically every minute he’s not helping his mother care for his dad. Usually Gideon is a web designer, so when he winds up working as a hands-on contractor for a computer system build-out on a construction project, he’s a little out of his element. Alex, an electrician, turns out to be working on the same project, and Gideon is impressed and chastened when the man he was incredibly rude to goes out of his way to help him. The two are attracted to each other, but before they can move forward, Gideon has to confront his judgmental attitudes. In addition to being African-American, Alex is blue-collar and also a big bear of a man, something Gideon is afraid of because of a painful experience with a former lover. Step by step, Alex shows patience and understanding as Gideon overcomes prejudices he never knew he had, but just as he’s realizing that Alex may be his unexpected but perfect life partner, pressure from Alex’s family situation may draw them apart. Russell explores expectations and preconceived notions from a variety of angles in this sexy and satisfying M/M romance, and the full cast of characters offers Gideon a variety of racial and class biases and stereotypes to overcome—a welcome addition to the narrative but not always subtle.
A poignant, thought-provoking love story on many levels.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62649-495-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
