Next book

HILL COUNTRY

Texas history, and its larger-than-life personalities—including a substantial appearance by that quintessential Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson—turns a fictionalized story of the author’s grandmother into a scattershot dash through time. Windle, whose first novel, True Women (paperback), became a 1996 CBS miniseries, now takes the incomplete autobiography of her paternal grandmother, Laura Woods, and converts it into a novel that is as much a celebration of a person as a place. The story begins in 1877, when Laura’s family is farming in the Texas Hill Country and Apache brigands roam the land. While her father is away, seven-year-old Laura, bathing in the river with her siblings, catches sight of an Apache band heading their way. The children warn their mother, who wounds the leader and forces his cohorts to flee. But Laura can’t forget one of the band, handsome Herman, a white boy who was stolen and raised by the Apache. Later, Laura meets up again with Herman and falls in love, but he can’t give up his outlaw life, so instead she marries Peter Woods, a local horse breeder. Her life continues to be full of incident as she tries to outwit Mexican Revolutionaries while entraining horses to Galveston, and as she watches Peter behead a man who ran down his cattle. Laura, though, harbors political ambitions. Her mother had once met Lincoln, and Laura continues the tradition as she encounters Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and, of course, Lyndon Johnson, whose mother Rebekah is her best friend. She longs for Peter to be elected governor but has to settle for appointive positions in Texas politics. In her 90s, she is still remembered by LBJ, who calls her every Christmas. Laura is brave, indeed, but her chilling self-regard makes her hard to like or admire. Still, a lively if uncritical reprise of recent Texas history.(First printing of 100,000; $250,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-56352-522-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Longstreet

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

Categories:
Close Quickview