An ambitious, fast-paced, but flawed debut.
A reunion of college friends turns deadly in a graphic novel that spans decades and continents.
Olmos (A Modular Approach to Fault Tree Analysis, 1979, etc.) and debut illustrator Nichols pack a lot into their first graphic novel, which centers on members of Jabberwocky, a rock band formed in the 1970s by college friends in Boston. In 1996, a reunion concert takes place when former band members Esteban and Jonah, both Californians, visit Montreal, the home of the former lead singer, Celia Suarez. She used to go by “Leticia Mendez,” her middle names; following college, she returned to her native Central America, where she came from great wealth. She went on to acquire both a husband and a lover, the latter calling her “a corrupt rich little girl.” After leaving both men, she moved to Europe before settling in Canada. When the reunion concert in Montreal ends, she plans to move west with ex-lover Esteban. Instead, she winds up dead under suspicious circumstances in his hotel room. Esteban claims innocence but skips town, leaving Jonah to help solve the case by investigating Celia’s past. He discovers that the singer supported a revolutionary group—and that her rich family hated revolutionaries. The book repeatedly skips back and forth in time, and Nichols handles the sequential art skillfully. However, the quality of the art is inconsistent; many panels are stunning, but others look incomplete in comparison. It’s also jarring that some characters look like real-life celebrities; Esteban, for example, is a ringer for musician Jackson Browne, and police detective Martin Courant is the doppelgänger of actor Ben Kingsley. However, there are occasional renderings that make identifying a character a challenge, especially when a person errs and refers to him by the wrong name. The dialogue balloons often look misshapen and clunky, and there are occasional misspellings (“strickly”; “sevices”), uneven line spacing, and a continuity error that has the band reuniting after 22 years in one panel and after 25 in another.
An ambitious, fast-paced, but flawed debut.Pub Date: June 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5215-1839-7
Page Count: 101
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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