An intelligent, if uneven, blend of romance and family conflict.
A debut novel about four sisters united by crisis.
Sixty-two-year-old Vivian “Vivvie” James teaches English in Madagascar. She’s suffered significant losses in her life, including the deaths of her husband and child, but she’s also a diligent optimist; despite her life in a hardship post, she holds “the charmed secret to life’s riddle: today is exquisitely new.” But when one of Vivvie’s three sisters, Laurel, is diagnosed with cancer, the family calls her home to Massachusetts’ North Shore, and Conover “Con” Bennett, Vivvie’s 49-year-old lover in Madagascar, inexplicably insists on joining her. Brooks’ prose is lush and delectable; in one scene, for example, the sun sinks “into the Indian Ocean like a temptress sliding into bed, kicking off her covers in brilliant streaks of tangerine, vermillion, and violet.” On the North Shore, seaweed is strewn about “as if many Spanish dancers…had fled, dropping their black shawls here and there in the sand in their haste to be home before dawn.” There are many such moments of stunning imagery, but the character development isn’t quite as strong. For example, Crystal Posey, mother of the four “Posey girls,” is a formidable presence in her daughters’ lives, but readers may find her an unimaginative portrait of decay: Vain and nearly deaf, she criticizes her children and resists technological change, and the story wastes much time showing readers how she mistreats her housekeeper, Inez. Laurel, the eldest sister, is essentially a copy of their mother, while Vivvie, Audrey and Jane all have artistic ambitions: Vivvie writes poetry but shares it only with Con; Audrey is a successful poet; and Jane, a former drama teacher, is writing a play. Occasionally, this common ground leads to rather dull exposition about education and art. Of the four sisters, Vivvie is the most sharply drawn, but her romance with Con seems a bit too good to be true; their only real conflict is that she desires to keep the independence she already has. When they finally have a confrontation, it lacks force: “ ‘I want you to forgive me for growing old…and I want you to say you’ll never leave me,’ Vivvie says. ‘All right, then, I won’t,’ Con says. ‘Was that so hard?’ ”
An intelligent, if uneven, blend of romance and family conflict.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1935925200
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
