If McGrath would just lose the embarrassing stereotypes and polish the writing, we'd like to see more of him.
In this second outing (Murder at Sunset, 2001), "nosey old maid" Maggie Goss, bless her, helps foil a North Korean terrorist plot.
Maggie and her good friend Helen Washington have retreated to Northern California to recuperate from the Mafia murders of their families. To distract herself, Maggie signs up for flying lessons, and during a simulated emergency, she attempts to land at Mysterious Valley, a private runway. As a bright green laser sweeps through the cockpit, Maggie, a gleaming example of chutzpah, resolves to identify the beam and its function, teaming up with physicist Chuck Hoppmann and sidekick Helen. While trespassing at the private airstrip, the trio encounters one of those sinister Asians with a Swedish surname and "a hint of Asian accent, like first generation Asian-Americans." It seems the North Koreans have set up headquarters at a nearby St. Helena winery to produce botulin toxin, and not for nifty Botox injections–but for use on warheads aimed at Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington! (The laser is a communication device, see.) The Keystone communists keep screwing everything up, however, by using non-Asian surnames, and by their insistence on driving "Asian sedans." (Don't ask, but the characters' real names aren't Korean at all, but, rather, "General Hi-Woo," for example, and "Major Sing.") Clearly, old Maggie has her work cut out for her. But the feisty amateur sleuth is up to the job, even becoming an FBI operative–complete with a backpack full of kickass Quantico-developed weaponry. The plot hustles along, with Maggie an interesting, if somewhat superficial, heroine.
If McGrath would just lose the embarrassing stereotypes and polish the writing, we'd like to see more of him.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9716072-2-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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