In Denker's popular novels (To Marcy, With Love, 1996, etc.), where bad things happen to good-to-saintly people, there's often a dollop of medical matter; here, in the story of a widow and mother confronting AIDS, there's a good deal of powerful information concerning the disease. Grace Cameron, widowed at 32 when her hemophiliac husband died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, supports herself and her 12-year-old daughter Kathy by operating a small calligraphy and gift-wrapping shop. On a routine doctor visit, though, she learns that she has AIDS, undoubtedly from a tainted blood transfusion given her husband in the past. She breaks the news to Kathy, and together the two weather the waves of fear and hope, anger and despair. As the disease progresses, Grace also realizes that she must find a home for Kathy, and she begins desperately to search for someone caring. There's wealthy, elderly—and bossy—Uncle Harry, eager to help but also eager to dictate Kathy's future. There is Aunt Hortense, who fears upsetting her childless marriage, as well as Aunt Louise, compulsively interfering and driven. Then there are the loving parents of Kathy's best friend—but does that marriage mask some hidden problem? Meantime, visits to the doctors proceed, and lab reports tell a chilling story. Kathy, grieving and obsessed, reads everything she can find about AIDS, learning the significance of the "branched DNA" test that reveals the status of the body's protective cells and that of the virus, and despairingly tracks the course of her mother's struggle. The haunting question of how long? is answered; Grace and Kathy celebrate Kathy's 13th birthday; and as the end approaches, Kathy herself will choose a home. Denker's people are inoffensive outlines, but the author's clear and convincing explanation of the nature and treatment of AIDS carries a natural impact. Sad stuff in a thin telling.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14963-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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