A rare bird of a children’s book that encourages young readers to become environmentally conscious.
At once both familiar and exotic, the rural Pennsylvania world of 12-year-old Claire Belle, an obsessive birdwatcher, is anything but mundane.
Along with her rambunctious sheepdog Sammy, best friend Victor, a member of the Cochiti Indian tribe, and Jerry “The Chicken Man,” Claire embarks on a life-changing journey involving a red-railed hawk that just might hold the key to her biggest secret–her ability to attract whatever bird she happens to be wearing a picture of on her shirt that day. Butler’s greatest triumph is her ability to bring her young hyperaware heroine to life. Using all five senses, the author describes Claire’s passion for the beauty of nature, its vivid sounds and smells–of “hemlock needles, scenting the crisp air” and crows that chirp like “tiny honking cars”–as well as sights like “lattices of shadow” that lie on a “twisting lane.” Instead of creating an unreachable fantasy world, Butler shines a spotlight on everyday magic without shying away from life’s tribulations. A subplot reveals the tension between Claire and her best friend Victor, a video- gamer as much as Claire is a birder, who is involved in his own exploration of a new frontier that leaves Claire behind–a “mission to Mars” undertaken with her only enemy Billy, a bully with a glass eye and a drunken father who also crosses Claire’s path. The story moves swiftly and unpredictably, barreling over its few inconsistencies, like Victor being both a shy boy who eats lunch alone and a gregarious gamer, or Billy being both scared of guns and willing to shoot at a nest unprovoked, not to mention several distracting typos. In fact, the nonstop action-adventure is so detailed–from depictions of a widow’s bobby-pinned hair, to Claire’s big home that doubles as her single mom’s country store, to the reasons Claire chose her bedroom with its large maple tree outside the window–that the book’s unspecific title and bland cover art simply don’t do justice to the narrative. Nor does the book’s ending, which wraps up inorganically. It moves from Claire being held at gunpoint to becoming friends with her sworn enemy in the span of a few quick pages. Even Claire wouldn’t believe that.
A rare bird of a children’s book that encourages young readers to become environmentally conscious.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9820342-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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
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