Strives for—and sometimes achieves—complexities that surpass superficial teenage drama.
Trust is broken and intrigues are explored in this coming-of-age novel about a young man.
Handsome and inquisitive, 18-year-old TJ has connected with Maggie, a young girl who lives nearby for the summer, and they’re in the process of developing a romantic relationship. But this girl is different. Naïve and sheltered, she interests TJ and pushes him to be more caring and concerned. However, the care and concern don’t last long. After falling out with his visiting uncle—TJ discovers that the man he once looked up to has bendable morals and a propensity to act out of selfishness and temptation—TJ then follows his uncle’s path, allowing himself to be seduced and rattled away from his original decision to be a good boyfriend, a stable friend, and an honest human. While the story will resonate with young people exploring romantic relationships, the characters sometimes fall into high school stereotypes. For example, TJ is a tall, lean, athletic boy with tan skin and striking good looks. Girlfriend Maggie describes herself as “plain Jane,” while the other girls who lure TJ are usually exotic and sexy. Readers may feel less compelled to relate to the characters when they fit stereotypes and high school clichés. Nevertheless, several small moments illustrate these characters as real people: Maggie, who wants to go to dentistry school, eventually questions TJ’s sincerity, showing her development from naiveté to awareness while “trying to reconcile the TJ she’d heard about from the other girls at school and the TJ she’d been dating this summer [who] was driving her crazy.” TJ, meanwhile, struggles with inner turmoil when he learns of secretive decisions made by his uncle—ones that could change TJ’s future. These moments of doubt and inner conflict help bring the characters to life while establishing genuine concern for their outcomes. Though the book features teenage characters, the detached third-person narrative voice feels strongly adult—“she held onto TJ’s erection as if she wanted to take it home with her as a souvenir”—and retrospective, like a grown-up looking back. Perhaps, then, adult readers interested in revisiting their teenage years will make an appropriate audience.
Strives for—and sometimes achieves—complexities that surpass superficial teenage drama.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5192-3225-0
Page Count: 418
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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