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SKY HIGH

A disappointing successor to Falconer’s notable debut, Primrose Hill (2001). She overdoes the grunge, then fumbles Ferdia’s...

Grownups hunting for younger sex partners cause a whole lot of confusion for one London teenager, victim of a triple whammy in this episodic second novel.

The family began to unravel for narrator Ferdia when his dad, a handsome actor terrified of turning 40, decamped to shack up with a minor-league, 24-year-old pop star. As the story opens, Ferdia gets more bad news: his mother has started sleeping with 22-year-old Jason Peckham, a member of the most thuggish family in the nearby projects. Mum is thrilled she can still reel ’em in, but Ferdia must endure the taunts of Jason’s cousin Gary, an attack dog at their rotten high school. Not feeling comfortable around either parent, Ferdia hangs out with best friend Matt, who lives with his alcoholic mother in a grim high-rise. Matt vents his rage against “breadheads” and “ground-dwellers” (the effete rich) in anarchic lyrics; he has formed a band, but only wants to play for his downtrodden mates. Enter Ferdia’s new English teacher, attractive 33-year-old Cassandra. In no time she initiates sex with her gorgeous student, a wild tumble in a filthy junkyard to which they will often return. It’s the first time for Ferdia (“blowing me sky high”), and teacher continues to call the shots. One minute an idealistic mentor, the next a self-destructive predator, then a mentor again, the superficially drawn Cassandra throws the novel out of whack. Ferdia abandons Matt and the band for her, but eventually the paparazzi discover their junkyard hideaway, and the tabloids allege Cassandra has a history of seducing her students. Before this can be sorted out, another crisis erupts: Matt, who has completely flipped, is threatening to jump from his sky-high flat, and Cassandra is forgotten.

A disappointing successor to Falconer’s notable debut, Primrose Hill (2001). She overdoes the grunge, then fumbles Ferdia’s coming-of-age in the too-hurried final sequences.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-89255-301-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE RUMOR

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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