by Georgia Denton Warren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2013
Evocative, elegiac romance.
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In this debut novel, a letter causes artist Margaret Windley to reflect upon a romance from 20 years ago.
Margaret is a single mom and artist living near a wildlife preserve in North Carolina. Her beloved father—her sole parent following her mother’s untimely death—is now also dead, and her son is about to start law school. Longtime neighbor Henry Jessup is, as always, admiring and nearby. Then Margaret is upended by a letter from the brother of John Ashton. He requests a meeting; she agrees via a return voice mail and proceeds to recall her whirlwind romance with John, a rich, aspiring young lawyer from New York City. They met 20 years before, in 1962, when he was staying in the nearby Mattamuskeet Lodge. Margaret was angry that John had shot some waterfowl, since she memorialized them in paintings; killing one member of a pair, as he did, greatly grieves the survivor. John, made aware of this and attracted to Margaret, made amends, soon came to dinner at her house, and later took her to a lodge dance. Afterward, they made love, and John went back home, promising to return. By novel’s end, Margaret finds out what happened to John and about her father’s surprising actions after John left as well as the legacy now left for her son, John. It all helps her finally move forward with her life and with a new relationship in the North Carolina region she loves. First-time novelist Warren notes that a trip to the actual Lake Mattamuskett inspired this nostalgic love story. She certainly captures the preserve’s natural beauty while channeling The Bridges of Madison County and the novels of Nicholas Sparks in this look back at a fleeting yet momentous romance. While this story’s final twists hold some dramatic appeal, readers might wish Warren had fleshed out this narrative a bit more, particularly Margaret’s life following John’s desertion as well as her fluctuating relationship with Henry. Overall, however, this is a gracefully executed impressionistic tale.
Evocative, elegiac romance.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615806129
Page Count: 142
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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