by Jane Etarie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2012
A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.
A raunchy, messy debut novel about two young people not quite in love.
Right at the start of this fast-paced, foul-mouthed story, the unnamed narrator is having a horrible day: Her car has been stolen, but the 911 dispatcher sternly reminds her that the line is for emergencies only, and her boyfriend, Robert, sends her a text that reads: “Boo I’m br8ing up with u. sorry.” The hapless narrator is no poster child for innocent living: She’s not particularly bright, she’s extremely fond of drugs and alcohol, and she’s not exactly the best worker at her faceless office job. “I work at Petrus Cheong and Affiliates. I don’t know what my job is,” she says. She spends her evenings wasted; she spends her days loathing her co-workers, the people who get her coffee orders wrong—everyone, basically, except the random celebrities on TV she fantasizes about: When she thinks of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s cooking recipes, she idly reflects, “I wish I could meet her, hang out with her, be like best friends. I’m pretty sure we’d get along great—we have so much in common.” She wants her Robert back in her life so badly that she sees no real problem with texting him back and telling him she’s pregnant; the only problem is that she then needs to get pregnant, or else she’ll run the risk of his breaking up with her again. They get back together, and the rest of the novel follows the constant zigzagging of their relationship, with Robert getting fired from one job after another, uselessly dreaming the whole time of writing a million-dollar screenplay as the narrator offers him one piece of stoned, dopey encouragement after another. Etarie peppers virtually every line of her novel with obscenities, all of them deployed with a deadpan pacing and humor worthy of Richard Price. Despite the two main characters’ flagrant shortcomings, Etarie’s skill at portraying their brainless, aimless hope actually generates sympathy where none should exist.
A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988051515
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Murder Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2013
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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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