An often involving story that memorably explores multiple social issues.
English teacher Krill addresses engaging what-if questions about parenthood in her debut novella.
Elizabeth and Andrew conceive their children via in vitro fertilization due to a spinal cord injury that Andrew received as a teenager. After their two children, Michelle and Stephen, are born, the couple faces the decision of what to do with the 10 remaining, unused embryos. Elizabeth is eager to help other couples with fertility issues, but Andrew, due in part to his unspoken homophobia, has reservations about adoption; nonetheless, they make the embryos available to others, with the option to contact them in case of medical necessity. Nearly two decades later, fissures in Elizabeth and Andrew’s seemingly perfect family appear as Michelle and Stephen exhibit troublesome adolescent behavior. Meanwhile, a few hours away, teenage twins Brian and Caroline have good relationships with their lesbian mothers, but athlete Caroline is puzzled by recurring headaches and fatigue. Later, Stephen finds a letter from a social worker requesting permission to give the family’s contact information to the mothers of biological siblings that he never knew he had. Caroline’s health crisis, and the desire of Elizabeth, Michelle, and Stephen to assist her, forces the families to confront repressed issues; in the process, Andrew reveals long-kept secrets about his youth and how he acquired his injury. Beautifully told and deeply affecting, this novella personifies an ethical issue in very simple terms. It uses the alternating points of view of significant characters to give them depth, and each of them is engaging in his or her own ways. Only Jessie and Allison, Brian and Caroline’s mothers, are less well-developed. The depiction of Andrew’s complex feelings prevents him from being wholly unsympathetic. However, the meaning of the author’s repeated references to “old souls” may not be entirely clear to all readers.
An often involving story that memorably explores multiple social issues.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-5905-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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