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WAKING THE MOON

Men have been in charge too long, and at this moment the moon goddess Othiym Lunarsa slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born—in this fourth novel and first hardcover from Hand. The main setting here is called the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine—the secret American center of the Benandanti, a group whose origins are lost in prehistory but whose magic now rules the world. But as Yeats's gyres foretell, the goddess cult will rise, so the Benandanti have already taken arms against it. Katherine Sweeney Cassidy has no idea why she's been elected as a student for Divine, but her professor of Magic, Witchcraft & Religion, Balthazar Warnick, knows very well: Sweeney must ultimately oppose fellow student Angelica di Rienzi, the superhumanly ravishing incarnation of the Moon Goddess—though Angelica doesn't know she's the goddess until she receives the Lunula, an ultramagical necklace lost in the earth for thousands of years. Also on hand: her consort, the most beautiful man on earth, 18-year-old Oliver Wilde Crawford, a latent schizo whose fund of arcane knowledge would fit nicely into Finnegans Wake. Star-crossed Oliver, however, is chosen as Champion of the Benandanti to oppose Angelica as well. Meanwhile, Hand shows a marvelous talent for sketching in college life, especially Angelica's lesbian second banana, Annie Harmon. Things go wrong terribly early when British archaeologist Magda Kurtz, who uncovered the Lunula at her dig in northern Estavia, drapes the charm around Angelica's neck, then is hurled by Balthazar into a lurid darkness filled with giant insects. As if updating Nancy Drew, this hyperweird murder is observed by Sweeney and Angelica. But, strangely, Angelica takes it in stride, as does Oliver later. Soon a moonswept Angelica assumes her goddesshood, sacrifices a bull, has herself impregnated by Oliver, then disappears—later to bear Dylan, the son she must sacrifice to bring about the Second Coming.... Page by page, great entertainment—with special effects from Industrial Light and Magic. (Author tour)

Pub Date: July 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-06-105214-0

Page Count: 390

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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