An unusual, if sometimes unclear, story collection with an intriguing premise.
A book of related short stories that examine the themes of fate and the consequences of small actions.
The three tales in Carr’s collection all center on the same two characters, and the same event, but they present different beginnings and different outcomes to their tales. In all three, a 13-year-old girl must land a small plane by herself. The first story, “Twenty-Six Minutes,” is a bare-bones account of the affair, set almost entirely within an air traffic control room. Kim, the young girl, finds herself left alone in the cockpit after her father suddenly slumps over mid-flight. Jim Hinton, the air traffic controller who takes charge, tries to calmly walk her through the necessary maneuvers to safely land the plane. Kim manages to escape mostly unharmed, and a short epilogue reveals that in the future, she and Jim “occasionally pass each other in the halls of the FAA facility, but neither knows of the other’s involvement on that day when two souls interacted.” The following two stories, “Broken Cord” and “Umbilical,” use the same dialogue when Kim tries to land the plane, but they flesh out the moments before and after the incident in different ways. Carr reveals Jim’s past pain in “Broken Cord,” which sets up a shocking, sad conclusion. “Umbilical” goes further back to reveal a surprising connection between Jim and Kim; this third and longest story follows the aftermath of the incident in the most detail, and it’s the most fully formed story of the three. However, it does provide a jarring shift in tone, from a tense disaster situation to a quiet, emotional tale of families and recovery. The three stories put forth questions of destiny and coincidence that remain puzzling and ambiguous after the tales are over. However, Carr excels at maintaining tension during the plane-landing scenario, and he manages to combine detailed, technical aspects of flying with suspense, thrills, and believable moments of solidarity between Jim and Kim. That said, readers may wish that there were more versions of the suspenseful scenes.
An unusual, if sometimes unclear, story collection with an intriguing premise.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1503510197
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
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 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
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