A well-written story that would benefit from a little less talk and a lot more action.
A butchered and bagged body shatters a spiritual community’s peace in California.
In Cyrus’ debut novel, sandals-wearing Father Ambrose didn’t expect to assist in a murder investigation. But as the abbot of the New Life Ecumenical Retreat, he also didn’t imagine a young woman’s dismembered body would find its way onto the community’s property. New Life boasts 25 nuns and 20 monks living on about 250 acres. In addition to meditating, the group grows, harvests, and sells wholesale and online fruit and other crops produced on its land. Because the deceased had tats, black fingernail polish, and spiky hair, it seems unlikely she was associated with a New Life resident. But Sheriff Charlie Cormley takes nothing for granted as New Life has a lot of people “who’ll cover for each other. And a lot of property to hide stuff on.” But it’s Father Ambrose who discovers that the dead woman knew one of the group’s monks. He might even have gotten her pregnant, with her condition confirmed by the medical examiner, who grins as she suggests whoever opened the bag of body parts must have had the smell “hit ’em right between the eyes.” It seems odd that any sorrowful feelings Father Ambrose, a spiritual man known for having visions, may have toward the victim appear superseded by his regret that the murder will alter the tranquility of his community, especially during harvest season. Fear of bad press also concerns him. Although the book is labeled The First Father Ambrose Mystery, Cormley holds center stage with the abbot. Characterization of both men is strong, as is that of the sheriff’s wife, Ruth, who refuses to turn on the insect zapper on buggy nights if Father Ambrose is visiting because he cringes “every time one of those little guys goes up in flames.” The interactions between characters are skillfully rendered, as is the dialogue. A third of the way through the tale comes the news that New Life is not a Roman Catholic monastery, but rather a community formed by former Catholics who believe strongly in meditation. Although it begins with the yikes factor of a body in a bag, the mystery becomes watered down by repetition of New Life’s dogma and the concerns of those who live outside the mainstream.
A well-written story that would benefit from a little less talk and a lot more action.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9977560-6-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Square Root Press LLC
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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