A well-researched mystery punctuated by thrilling tension and deep emotion.
Haddleton’s debut is a striking, multifaceted take on the family-secret novel.
In the year 1900, Darby Walker makes the trek across Florida’s Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg; his brother Tulley’s lighthouse has gone dark, and their father is dead under suspicious circumstances. The timelines are split between this urgent present and the brothers’ childhood, starting with Darby’s birth in 1865. These sections provide background on the bitter conflicts between gregarious, sensitive Darby and boundary-pushing, standoffish Tulley, but they also delve deeper into the Walker family’s roots and its history in Cape Cod. Haddleton’s use of multiple time periods offers various perspectives on both Darby’s and Tulley’s backstories. Most strikingly, the novel outlines the life of the boys’ grandfather Nathaniel, a staunch abolitionist who once helped to free slaves from Florida plantations. Nathaniel’s history in particular sets up powerful themes, connecting the family to the land and seas of Florida and Massachusetts as well as their participation in historical events and prejudices. Some paths, like Nathaniel’s, are heroic, but others contain dark chapters that pit brother against brother, foreshadowing Darby and Tulley’s present-day conflict. The nuanced exploration of these themes of compassion and strife would be enough to recommend the book, but it also drives the plot in the present as Darby questions Tulley about his role in their father’s death. The writing here lends a strong sense of place to the proceedings, as do thorough—but not overwhelming—details on ships, lighthouses, and the sea: “Darby only had to make it six miles across the bay….There were no passengers aboard to complain about the rough ride or about getting wet, and a little salt water on the boat didn’t concern Darby in the slightest.” With the initial murder mystery linking all these disparate elements together, this must-read novel maintains a consistent, compelling sense of tension and feeling.
A well-researched mystery punctuated by thrilling tension and deep emotion.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949066-23-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Onion River Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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