An unsatisfying thriller that nonetheless contains insights into familial wounds.
Degani’s affable debut, a suspenseful novel about mothers and daughters, aims to be thrilling, socially relevant and heartwarming all at once.
Abbie Palmer feels unfulfilled. The married English professor with two children has never figured out what she wants from life. The heart of the problem lies in her unresolved issues with her mother, a movie starlet from Hollywood’s golden age,who committed suicide in the 1950s. When an African-American woman claiming to be Abbie’s half sister dies in a mysterious fire, Abbie and the dead woman’s daughter, Makenna, set out to learn the truth—not only about the fire, but also about the passions and pains of Abbie’s mother’s short life. This plot allows Degani to wade into some heady, race-related waters, including present-day hate crimes and past taboos regarding interracial relationships. However, she avoids diving too deep into these subjects, never swimming too far from the shore of her standard thriller plot. Although the book regularly reminds readers that Abbie and Makenna are in danger, the prose lacks gravitas, often relying on clichés (“My heart skips a beat”; “The past is past and maybe it should stay that way”) and overexplanations, which sometimes make the novel feel like a Nancy Drew mystery in which nothing much is at stake. The plotting also disappoints, as Abbie and Makenna have little trouble solving the mystery; each clue hides in plain sight, and the right person always shows up at the right time, making everything too easy for the amateur sleuths. It all leads to an ending that tries to be heartwarming but instead tips the scale into sappiness. That said, Abbie is a likable narrator, self-aware (“I’m a regular Kinsey Milhone from those alphabet mystery books”) and self-deprecating (“I’m ‘on leave’ from my husband to—do what? Find myself? Oh, God”). Also, in her portraits of mother-daughter relationships, Degani finds genuine weight, even if she sometimes struggles to bear it.
An unsatisfying thriller that nonetheless contains insights into familial wounds.Pub Date: April 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988125780
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Every Day Novels
Review Posted Online: June 8, 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
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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