Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.
A widow’s efforts to become a home-funeral guide entangle her in a murder case in this novel.
As Abby Tiernan’s husband, Tom, lies dying of cancer, he requests a home funeral rather than being embalmed in a mortuary and interred in an expensive casket. Washing and preparing a body at home, with burial in a simple wooden box, used to be the common practice, but nowadays few even know that it’s legal. In today’s culture, says a home-funeral guide Abby consults, “we want to disappear our dead.” After Tom’s death, Abby spirals downward, but starts pulling herself together—especially when community members in Falls Harbor, Maine, start asking for her help in conducting their own home funerals. She’s at first reluctant, but Abby sees a need and eventually starts offering her services as a home-funeral guide to people like Mark Jackson, whose wife, Susan, is dying. But not everyone appreciates her efforts, such as a local funeral home director. Attempts are made to scare her off; worse, Abby falls under suspicion after Susan dies—and readers already know from the prologue that it’s murder. Questions swirling, Abby decides to investigate, while also trying to salvage a relationship with her daughter, Delia, and to get closer to Brad Rainey, a Falls Harbor detective and widower. Buried secrets come to light, and Abby finds a way to move on while helping others. Mackey (Suddenly Spying, 2016, etc.) offers an unusual but successful combination of murder mystery, romance after widowhood, and a mother-daughter story with an informative and thoughtful discussion on attitudes and practices toward the dying and funerals. The traditional funeral-home director gets to say his piece here as well, giving the question a fair outing. The author also discusses the ethical issues involved with assisted suicide versus euthanasia, again presenting points of view equitably. These issues link well with the plot, and rarely become didactic. The mother-daughter dilemma is somewhat melodramatic and Abby’s endless what-if questions can become tiresome, but these are minor concerns.
Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972080-2-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pink Granite Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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