A messy, but ultimately memorable, look at the moral gray areas that govern our choices.
Four women have their friendship tested by a series of traumatic revelations.
As first-year students at the prestigious Quincy-Hawthorn College, four suitemates are thrown together and enter into an intensely close friendship. Lainey, a mixed-race adoptee, devotes herself to political activism and short-lived romances. Alice comes from an upper-crust white family and is on track to be a star athlete and pre-med student. Ji Sun, from Korea, is cocooned by her extraordinary wealth, and Margaret, from a lower-middle-class white Missouri family, by her extraordinary beauty. Ames structures this, her debut novel, in four parts, each of which corresponds, like an ethics textbook, to a different moral quandary centered on one of the women. In the novel’s opening section, “The Accident,” Alice struggles to keep secret from her new roommates a childhood trauma that wracks her with guilt. Further into their time at Quincy-Hawthorn, in the second section, “The Accusation,” the women learn that Ji Sun plans to accuse her professor of sexual harassment. In the final two parts, “The Kiss” and “The Bite,” Margaret and then Lainey—now new wives and mothers—inflict trauma on children in very different ways. Written in a deft omniscient narration, the novel’s first half can sometimes blur the characters together within its slippery point of view, and the crushes and drunken exploits seem like overly familiar snapshots from collegiate life. But the novel sharpens when the women come into independent adulthood, and though the structure emphasizes the sameness of their transgressions—the way all of us will cross lines for morally complicated reasons—the characters finally bloom into vibrant individuality, and the book fulfills its promise to investigate the question Margaret asks herself near the book’s finale: “Did loving so much mean you knew more about hatred?”
A messy, but ultimately memorable, look at the moral gray areas that govern our choices.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7849-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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