In Warburton’s debut novel, a village massacre in Vietnam by U.S. operatives ignites new violence 30 years later, and reunites a lone survivor with her rescuer.
Tom Warburton is a member of the British army who’s been living under an assumed identity in Australia for the past three decades. He was forced into this exile after his small Special Air Service unit killed a band of CIA-led soldiers in Vietnam who were attempting to brutalize a young Vietnamese girl—the only survivor of a village the Americans destroyed. The CIA, however, blames the village massacre on Tom’s unit. After Tom went into hiding, his only comfort was a secret correspondence with Sue, the girl he helped rescue, who’s now a member of the Malaysian Secret Service. She and Tom carry on a long-distance romantic relationship. But the promotion of Richard Macauley, the son of an agent killed that infamous day in the jungle, means that Tom and Sue are once again in the CIA’s crosshairs. As the couple avoids Richard’s vengeance, they get a chance to expose the horrors perpetrated on Sue’s family, and also finally live a life together. Warburton’s debut thriller hits all the usual thriller notes, taking its characters to locations all over the world for hushed conversations and violent confrontations. The CIA operatives make truly despicable villains; although not all of Macauley’s agents are as malevolent as he is, their cutthroat methods are no less sickening. The novel manages to capture the tangible regret in Tom and Sue’s relationship; the time that they’re forced to live apart feels tragic, even when compared to the destruction of the village. Despite this, the book is plagued by subject and tense confusion, inconsistent and often incorrect punctuation (“Is the girl OK Tom. Get her to safety mate for me”), and numerous, distracting typos (“We are human as well mam”). Run-on sentences are common, but not in a way that suggests any unique narrative voice, and the end result is an inscrutable tangle that works against the suspense.
A promising premise, lost in clumsy prose that fosters more confusion than intrigue.
Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483649597
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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