A messy love story packed with nostalgia.
A teenager moves from a run-down, coal mining town to an artistic haven in this debut novel.
Eighteen-year-old Daniel McHale is just about to graduate from high school when tragedy strikes: His single mother suddenly dies, leaving him and his twin brother, Dustin, uncertain about their futures. Daniel, the dreamier of the two, confides in Jane Hatfield, the owner of the local bookstore, who tells him that if he wants to make anything of himself, he needs to leave town. Luckily, she has a friend who rears horses in the city of Jenningsburg who’s looking for a hired hand. Soon Daniel is off to a new life of hard but fulfilling labor for tough, good-natured Kathy Delaney, who moonlights as an artist and helps nurture his love for antiques and historic buildings. Everything changes, though, when Daniel meets Amelia Branagan, a violist in a Celtic band who visits Jenningsburg every summer: “He knew this one was special. He wasn’t sure why yet, he just knew his soul was singing, his heart was tingling, and his stomach was alive with hundreds of butterflies dancing about.” Daniel and Amelia begin spending their weekends together, going on long hikes to waterfalls and taking a historic, steam-powered train to a restored Shaker village. Before Amelia leaves to go on tour, Daniel works up the courage to confess his love to her. But she demurs, unwilling to enter a long-distance relationship. When she returns a year later, will Daniel convince her that she’s truly “the woman of his dreams”? This heartfelt novel’s strong beliefs in the ways of the past, devoted love, and the beauties of nature are quite admirable. But Daniels’ tale, which offers two artistic protagonists, sometimes suffers from blandness and clichés, both in its main romantic plot (“Amelia’s voice was like the choir of 100 angels. Looking into her eyes was like looking at the stars”) and in the bizarre woodenness of its descriptions: “His face was slender, his nose wasn’t large, but it was bigger than the national average for a man of his age and race.” And just as the town Daniel grows up in has very few redeeming qualities, his experiences in Jenningsburg are so hyperbolically positive (“enchanting,” “magical,” “poetry would be written about it”) that the effect at times becomes numbing.
A messy love story packed with nostalgia.Pub Date: May 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-054-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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