An impassioned debut, but the people get lost in the landscape.
A middle-aged Chicago journalist revisits the Kansas plains of her childhood.
Chicago-based “nomad” and Tribune bigwig Rebecca Kluger perpetually jeopardizes her thriving career by jetting west without warning or vacation time. She’s usually on the trail of her elusive brother Tom, who prefers wilderness to kin, and the two finally reunite to return to descendants in Oklahoma the ancestral remains of members of the Nadi-ish-dena tribe, who once lived on land the Kluger family later farmed. First, however, Rebecca examines the bones of her own past in a first-person narrative pastiche that’s rich in anecdote but weak on sustained development. She zips through childhood, college, the move to Chicago, a few affairs, and her meteoric, seemingly effortless rise from cub reporter to foreign correspondent, all the while remaining spiritually tethered to her home state. (Black offers a moving, and justifiably tragic, depiction of the fate of the farmers, land, slaughtered buffalo, and feedlot-incarcerated cattle of the Great Plains.) The pace slows abruptly once Rebecca finds Tom; our heroine does less summarizing and more storytelling, but still tends to “report” her emotions. Meanwhile, her fellow characters rarely manage to elbow Rebecca aside long enough to enact an entire scene, but a few get to have their say nonetheless. Interspersed with Rebecca’s chronicle are monologues by long-dead but still talkative Nadi-ish-dena, who give their own accounts of the West’s shameful history. These passages are often engrossing—one woman’s “journey to the other side of the Sun” to visit Louis XV’s court is especially dizzying—but they also contain clunkers like “He carried the wisdom of eagles in his heart.” The parallel narratives and their characters intertwine with increasing frequency, and while some of the resulting coincidences are unpredictable, others will strain the credulity even of readers willing to grant the guidance of the spirit world.
An impassioned debut, but the people get lost in the landscape.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-58654-032-7
Page Count: 359
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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