A superb magical tribute to fathers, sons, and those who love them.
A supernatural thriller about a priest, his wayward son, and the voodoo sorcerer who could exploit their secret.
The Caribbean fishing town of La Croix has seen a decrease in tourism lately. This summer, a monstrous storm approaches, bringing unbearable humidity. While the older generation sees the storm in terms of angry spirits and evil omens, the young people don’t believe in magic. Jaime—son of Panon, a respected priest—only wants to work, raise money, and move to America, where riches and modernity await. He wants nothing to do with his father’s profession. The rift between father and son widens when the government is overthrown and Jaime risks his life as cheap labor during the new government’s reconstruction. Because Panon carries a secret regarding Jaime’s birth, he’s afraid to ask his patron spirit, Dela Luamba, for help. He goes instead to the new sorcerer of La Croix, Bougné, who has moved into the jungle shack of Uzoma, the previous sorcerer, who died under suspicious circumstances. Will the enchanted contents of a wooden box help Panon bring Jaime back into the fold—or is something darker afoot, better fought with a touch of ordinary magic? Author Thibeault (co-author: Recommend This!, 2014, etc.) beats a steady, foreboding drum in this unique supernatural thriller. He concocts a sinister atmosphere early on, during the government coup: “flashes of light in the distance...merged into a single glow, as if the world itself burned.” The spirit Dela Luamba brings some humor to the tale in snarky missives between chapters and in communion with Panon: “You’re such a good dancer. And you have a sexy ass.” Thibeault deftly explores both the father’s and son’s perspectives, including Jaime’s frustration with magic: “People danced and shook when they should have been discussing the matters at hand.” The story’s latter half is a claustrophobic jungle crawl punctuated by scenes of voodoo horror. In the end, the ordinary magic steering Thibeault’s incredible narrative is Dela Luamba’s to vouch for.
A superb magical tribute to fathers, sons, and those who love them.Pub Date: March 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1935893349
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Dime Novel Books
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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