An innocent and mild-mannered boy grows up fast and ugly as his choice of friends sucks him into another family’s self-destructive tailspin: a relentlessly hardscrabble debut. In the northern reaches of rural Vermont, where dirt roads are fast tracks for renegades and every house and trailer hides a tragedy, 16-year-old Jessup is simply trying to come to terms with a first awkward romance. After going the whole season without kissing the girl who was a summer visitor, he’s now left with fishing and daydreaming to occupy his time. All that changes, however, on the day when Reg nearly runs him over as Jessup is trying to hitch a ride after his bike breaks down. Reg is older, a hard-driving, hard-drinking, hard-nosed ex-con with a big marijuana harvest to haul out of the mountains and a grudge against a local pair of brothers who are also in the cultivation business and whom he blames for sending him to prison. He gives Jessup a ride to remember, first introducing him to his family: wheelchair-bound Hal, a weight-guessing barker at county fairs; and Marigold, whose married life hasn't been the same since her logger husband lopped off a piece of his equipment with the chainsaw. Hal and Reg get Jessup so stoned, drunk, and dizzy that he’s sick. Then Marigold comes on to him, and when the night is over the boy hardly knows who he is anymore. Worse, the dark side to Reg is swiftly triggered when, in his cabin, he finds a cousin all shot up amid the pot plants. He hatches a malevolent plan, with Jessup’s unwitting aid, that’s somewhere between suicidal and just crazy. When the smoke clears, Jessup is battered, traumatized by all he’s seen, and utterly alone. Absent fathers are the supposed reason for this whole misadventure. Maybe, but the characters move at the speed of light toward rack and ruin, and the psychology can't keep up.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88517-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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