A revenge tale set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the crime-ridden streets of the U.S. capital.
In the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Holmes watches as his father is mercilessly gunned down, not by the overzealous white police force, but by a member of his community—the notorious, sadistic Charlie Ringnose. But as the connection for white sellers to funnel drugs into the black neighborhoods, Ringnose is untouchable in Washington, D.C., and the murder of Bobby’s father will seemingly go unpunished. Fast forward to Bobby as an adult, now a successful doctor but still haunted by the tragedy and more determined than ever to avenge his loss. Ringnose has had D.C.’s criminal element in a stranglehold for years, and the vengeful doctor isn’t the only one who wants him dead. Prue’s debut is overly ambitious—while it broadly addresses the themes of race and power in America, it ultimately falls short of identifying the connection implied between the two. Though enemies, Bobby and Ringnose are largely motivated by the same deep-seated rage, a resentment cultivated from years of struggling under racial inequality, but Bobby’s quest for revenge is never adequately tied to that anger specifically, while Ringnose’s lust for power seems born of simple greed. The novel’s prose is unique, deploying a semipoetic style with noir influences that alternates between candid and lyrical without being jarring, save for the disappointing moments when it falls back on hokey, action-movie tropes such as sensationalized gang wars or a hired-nursemaid assassin. The novel’s first half is the most notable and impressive, where the frank depictions of civil unrest in the 1960s—coupled with the younger Bobby’s wide-eyed wonder—capture a time in America when things seemed their bleakest, but people still dreamed of something better. Opens strong, but loses its way and becomes a cookie-cutter revenge story.
Pub Date: March 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453821855
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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