An intriguing tale about how people can affect one another long after they part ways.
A fun, poignant story about eight college students’ shared experience in Italy and how their youthful idealism and indiscretions affect their adulthoods.
Mencini’s debut novel starts in the present day with the middle-aged Bella Rossini receiving an invitation to reunite with people from her past—including a man who broke her heart. As a result, she’s forced to confront the choices she made after their relationship failed. The story then rewinds 30 years to a night that a rebellious Bella spends in jail. Her mother, concerned that Bella is mixing with the wrong crowd, enrolls her in a summer class in Italy. There she meets a cast of characters who leave an indelible mark on her life, including beautiful twins Karen and Meghan; smooth-talking Rune; bookworm Lee; sweet but insecure Hope; attractive athlete Philip; and Stillman, an outgoing Southerner with a haunted past. A classic summer-abroad tale of lust, love and adventure unfolds, but Mencini manages to steer clear of clichés. She tells the story primarily from Bella’s perspective, with other characters occasionally taking the helm to offer tidbits about their own pasts. Eventually, the summer comes to an end and the students go off to live their lives—realities filled with moments of excitement, disappointment and loss. Three decades later, they reunite in Italy to reacquaint themselves with each other and face some ugly truths. Overall, the story is often engaging, if sometimes a little unrealistic. The novel can, at times, provide too much detail in its descriptions, as when an adult Lee finishes a meal: “After enjoying his pasta dinner and responsibly drinking only one glass of wine, he drove home to finish the bottle there.” However, Mencini also provides beautiful prose that brings settings to life: “[T]he morning sun yielded to a landscape vista dotted with hilltop villas, vineyards, and olive groves. Gold, orange, pink, and dusty greens unfolded in a rolling patchwork.”
An intriguing tale about how people can affect one another long after they part ways.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938592003
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Capriole Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2013
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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