by Jacob M. Appel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2015
Another strong story collection that displays the author’s trademark thoughtfulness, humanity, and wit.
Ordinary people practice the magic of deception in Appel’s (Einstein’s Beach House, 2014) short story collection, which won the 2014 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for fiction.
These eight stories, all previously published in literary journals, deal insightfully with the vanity of human wishes. At the end of this, his 10th book since 2013, Appel—an attorney, physician, bioethicist, essayist, and fiction writer—describes himself as “strikingly ordinary.” That seemingly contradictory and perhaps deceptive statement captures what’s so engrossing about his characters: they’re ordinary people who are strikingly, but sometimes deceptively, themselves. Often, they use deceit to navigate grief, loss, or desire. In “The House Call,” for example, Miriam’s young son has died. She once had an acting job in which she portrayed a patient for medical students. While visiting her son’s grave, she runs into one of those students, Jeannie, who remembers her gratefully. When Jeannie seems disappointed that Miriam didn’t pursue acting as a career, Miriam pretends to have cancer—only later to discover that Jeannie never became a doctor. This story’s conclusion demonstrates the rich interplay between fact and fiction and the longing for connection that inhabits these tales, even when that connection is based on pretense: “For a brief moment, I let myself believe that if she’d been a real doctor, and I’d actually had cancer, she’d have been able to heal me.” Appel reveals character well, through narrative voice, dialogue, and often through profession, as in “The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs,” in which a Turkish-American locksmith fights eminent domain by chaining and locking people “to awnings, to drainpipes, to bicycle stands.” Though the characters are often frustrated in their desires for love, success, security, or revenge, they generally come to a rueful sort of peace—often after a tough decision and often in the midst of absurdity. The author handles tone beautifully, mustering a seriocomic deadpan in “Natural Selection,” as a father decides how to handle a baboon that his daughter rescued from a research lab, or in the titular tale, in which a laundromat gains a reputation for performing miracles (“Mrs. Garcia announced that Mae West—a.k.a. washer number sixteen—had cured her chronic incontinence”).
Another strong story collection that displays the author’s trademark thoughtfulness, humanity, and wit.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Snake Nation Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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