A laudable story with robust female characters and skillfully woven themes of race and gender.
Two women with strong ties to historic land in Atlanta fight to prevent a developer from building luxury condos on the site in this debut drama.
Arden Collier lives in Silver Park, which her grandfather set up years ago. Due to its significance to the African American community, the land has been designated for historic preservation. Regardless, Buddy Caldwell, a developer, plans to build a six-story condominium complex in Silver Park. Not surprisingly, Arden refuses to sell her property to Caldwell, who tries to convince the county to seize it under eminent domain. But 52-year-old Parker Gozer owns much of the land in Silver Lake, as her father, Foster, who “built half of Atlanta,” left it to her. She’s a public relations director for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., but is currently in Atlanta on business. She likewise has no interest in selling to Caldwell or even being in his company. He once worked for her father and, 10 years Parker’s senior, took advantage of her when she was barely a teen. Arden will get her chance to argue against the condo development at an upcoming summons hearing. But it will be a battle to keep her home, even with her childhood friend Parker on her side. Pinholster steeps her novel in absorbing subplots. Arden, for example, is an artist struggling financially, as critics tore apart her last show, while Parker works long hours to support her family, putting a strain on her marriage to Beamer. Instances of sexism and racism are apparent but not blatantly so. Caldwell is guilty of both, as it seems he wants the advocacy of the summons hearing chairperson solely because she’s a woman of color. Many of the men are unfortunately one-dimensional, including Parker’s relentlessly condescending boss, who calls her “Parky,” and likable but flighty Beamer, whose phone is typically off despite his wife’s hours-long daily commute. On the other hand, Arden and Parker are astute and tenacious, aided by an often witty narrative. Parker resists the urge to fingernail-slash Caldwell in order to retain “a perfectly good manicure.”
A laudable story with robust female characters and skillfully woven themes of race and gender.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-318-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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