This slim sequel with flimsy characters makes for a quick, easy read.
Edmond Dantes, and his many identities, traverses the world in this whirlwind of a sequel.
Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, Sultan of Monte Cristo, Sinbad the Sailor, Sultan of Albania. Each of these is the same man, originally known as Edmond Dantes from Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The Holy Ghost Writer (That Girl Started Her Own Country, 2012) begins this sequel with Dantes (first introduced in the series as Sinbad the Sailor), who’s struggling with an identity crisis. He can’t determine whether he must let go of his previous lives as Edmond and the Count in order to move forward. Not only does he quickly decide to accept all his identities, he decides to create new ones. As Sinbad, he marries Haydee, previously a slave in Dumas’ book, and declares himself the Sultan of Albania. His escapades continue when he returns to Paris and reunites with Mercedes, his first love. It’s evident that their love for one another remains. Dantes courts Mercedes before proposing to her, asking that she be his second wife in his harem in Albania. Dantes continues his journey as the Sultan of Albania and encounters Raymee, daughter of Abram. Abram is in the midst of negotiating the marriage of Raymee to the caliph of Mecca. Raymee is a brazen and strong-willed woman with enchanting violet eyes. She’s resistant to becoming the caliph’s wife for fear of losing her independence, so she requests the Sultan of Albania’s help to resolve her crisis. Dantes’ adventure is fast-moving—the reader must jump from scene to scene and country to country to keep pace. These scenes, however, are thin in detail. The hero brushes aside any hint of conflict or obstacle. The characters, upon introduction, quickly fall into one of two categories: good or bad. Each character either relies heavily on the development from the previous novel or is two-dimensional. The narrative seems to borrow too much from previous works of fiction; it doesn’t sufficiently forge its own identity.
This slim sequel with flimsy characters makes for a quick, easy read.Pub Date: July 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1480278417
Page Count: 76
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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