Burke’s gritty coming-of-age tale is a typically entertaining read that may cap a trilogy but also begs for a sequel.
The Holland clan that features in various series by the prolific author appears this time in 1952 Houston, where street gangs, mobsters, and class conflict offer a grim view of postwar America.
At 17, Aaron Holland Broussard falls in love with the brainy, beautiful Valerie Epstein just as she’s dumping the scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families. Aaron then upsets a gang of toughs in Valerie’s neighborhood, his best friend drifts into dealing drugs and stealing cars with two Mexican hoods, and the scion turns out to be tied to the twisted son of a vicious local mobster. When a Cadillac used to hide cash and gold goes missing, all the players are involved. Through Aaron’s narration, Burke (House of the Rising Sun, 2015, etc.) muses on courage and one’s response to serious challenges. Aaron’s father went over the top from WWI’s trenches, another man dropped behind enemy lines in WWII, and a third battles alcohol and unemployment. Aaron discovers he is brutally capable with his fists. It’s a rough summer for any teen, though a reference by Aaron to “my trek up Golgotha” is over-the-top in another way. Purplish prose, facile psychology, and short-changed female characters are the trade-offs with this highly readable and sometimes eloquent writer. Burke, age 79, who has said this novel completes a trilogy with Wayfaring Stranger (2014) and Rising Sun (2015), was born in Houston and sets Aaron’s age to match his own in 1952 while also marking him as a would-be writer and having him tell his story some 60 years after the novel’s events. The personal elements might intrigue fans, suggesting real influences for an author whose characters frequently tap reserves of violence and courage to cope with past sins and present evil.
Burke’s gritty coming-of-age tale is a typically entertaining read that may cap a trilogy but also begs for a sequel.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-501-10720-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the...
Sentimental, heartfelt novel portrays two children separated during the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In 1940s Seattle, ethnicities do not mix. Whites, blacks, Chinese and Japanese live in separate neighborhoods, and their children attend different schools. When Henry Lee’s staunchly nationalistic father pins an “I am Chinese” button to his 12-year-old son’s shirt and enrolls him in an all-white prep school, Henry finds himself friendless and at the mercy of schoolyard bullies. His salvation arrives in the form of Keiko, a Japanese girl with whom Henry forms an instant—and forbidden—bond. The occasionally sappy prose tends to overtly express subtleties that readers would be happier to glean for themselves, but the tender relationship between the two young people is moving. The older Henry, a recent widower living in 1980s Seattle, reflects in a series of flashbacks on his burgeoning romance with Keiko and its abrupt ending when her family was evacuated. A chance discovery of items left behind by Japanese-Americans during the evacuation inspires Henry to share his and Keiko’s story with his own son, in hopes of preventing the dysfunctional parent-child relationship he experienced with his own father. The major problem here is that Henry’s voice always sounds like that of a grown man, never quite like that of a child; the boy of the flashbacks is jarringly precocious and not entirely credible. Still, the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages while waiting for the story arc to come full circle, despite the overly flowery portrait of young love, cruel fate and unbreakable bonds.
A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50533-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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