A touching exploration of two sisters pulled by the past.
A middle-aged songwriter reconsiders her life in Burgess' tender, sharply observed novel.
Marley Stone, who has been writing hit songs for her twin sister, Andi, a country music star, for more than 20 years, is beginning to wonder whether she can do it any longer. After breaking up with her boyfriend of six years, she heads north from Seattle to the cabin in the woods where she and Andi lived with their flighty, determined mother, Donna, and where Donna has recently, and mysteriously, killed herself by stepping into the nearby lake with rocks sewn into her pockets. Intending to clear out both the cabin and her mind, Marley finds her life complicated by her old high school boyfriend, recently and possibly only temporarily separated from his wife, and by an abusive man from her past who has begun stalking her. At the same time, she tries to solve the mystery of a letter her uncle claims Donna received from the father Marley and Andi never knew. Burgess crams more action and characters into a weekend than it can comfortably handle—particularly by the time Andi and the majority of her high school class show up at a bar—and the male characters tend to be one-dimensionally good or evil, but the relationship between the twins is believably complex. Even Donna, who could easily have become the stereotypically unhinged mom, is intriguingly complicated, unknowable to the end. Burgess evokes both Seattle and the Idaho countryside in sensuous detail and effortlessly weaves the process of music-making into the story.
A touching exploration of two sisters pulled by the past.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64437-135-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Black Opal
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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