Despite some flaws, this engaging thriller should appeal to theater folks and New Orleans fans.
A man who returns to his hometown following his father’s untimely death finds passion and peril in this novel.
After receiving the blunt news “Father found dead,” actor Jeff Chaussier heads home—18 hours on a bus for the fearful flyer—to see family and friends and to investigate whether anyone drove his fireman dad to an early grave. Chaussier first visits his best friend, chain-smoking Don, who runs a small theater in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Sparks fly between Chaussier and the theater’s stage manager, Bryna Boudreaux, a feisty, Garbo-featured, blond knockout in a tummy-baring pink T-shirt. Bryna has secrets, and one of them smokes stogies and drives around in a big, black car. Chaussier’s dad also had secrets; after his best friend, Bubber Watkins, “died ugly” in a suspicious fire, he declared that there was “something” he “was going to do something about.” Someone wants to do something about Chaussier too, as he is jumped by two thugs in the French Quarter. Could the attack be linked to the bogus autopsy report on file for his father? In this lively series opener, some pieces of Sanchez’s (A-Roving No More, 2019, etc.) puzzle don’t fit—why, for example, does Chaussier initially suspect his father’s death wasn’t accidental, as a police report claimed? Why didn’t Chaussier go to his dad’s funeral? And why was news of his father’s death sent in a telegram rather than relayed in a phone call? Dated language creeps in; for example, Chaussier says, “I needed to husband my wardrobe.” In addition, deficient editing results in numerous sentences being repeated word for word several pages apart. Hearing Chaussier routinely explain “I’m an actor” grows tiresome but descriptions of the Crescent City seem almost poetic (“New Orleans has no star. She is an ensemble piece”). The author is at his best when depicting the food, the smells, and the buildings and docks of the French Quarter (some readers may even target the Big Easy as their next travel destination).
Despite some flaws, this engaging thriller should appeal to theater folks and New Orleans fans.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-26862-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Southern Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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