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
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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