A somewhat uneven collection that showcases the author’s keen eye for cultural detail and his affection for his characters.
In 16 short stories linked by a single narrator, Nimmo (Pele, Volcano Goddess of Hawai’i, 2011, etc.) sketches the world of a gay Iowa farm boy in the 1940s and ’50s.
Lachlan MacLennan is the fourth generation of his Scottish family to live in Tools Rock, a small farming town in central Iowa. The residents notice but tolerate one another’s eccentricities, including a communitywide obsession with the weather, and most people follow paths very similar to their parents’. But times are changing; Lach’s cousin Letha, a young woman, eschews marriage and leaves town to attend college in Chicago, and young Lach can foresee a life for himself far away from Tools Rock. As a child, he escapes Iowa for upstate New York when his father is hired to work in a wartime defense job and the family moves to an Army base. (Lach charmingly begins one story: “I always felt a little guilty because I had so much fun during World War II.”) After the war ends, the MacLennans return home, to Lach’s great disappointment: “No movies. No soldiers. No river. No army base. Nothing but cornfields. And all the people looked alike.” He acclimates himself again to Tools Rock, but he never really fits in. At an early age, he senses that he doesn’t share the attraction to girls that other boys have. His attempts to explore his own sexuality include repeatedly viewing explicit photographs that he discovered in his friend’s parents’ closet and, in college, making very awkward overtures to men who advertise on bathroom walls. However, as Nimmo portrays it here, growing up intellectually gifted and gay in a 1950s Iowa farm town isn’t very stressful for Lach. His very conventional family and friends accept him, and he manages to emerge unscathed into adulthood, ready to form mature relationships with other men. Some readers might construe this outcome as unrealistic. The prose style matches the personalities of the plainspoken Midwesterners (“Tools Rock had its share of strange people. Some were downright weird”), but readers might have welcomed more drama throughout.
A somewhat uneven collection that showcases the author’s keen eye for cultural detail and his affection for his characters.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493637614
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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