If she were real, Winer's heroine would be your hands-down first choice if you got in trouble. But as a lucky and hopefully...
A seasoned criminal defense attorney must draw on her experience to save a teenage client who doesn’t want to be saved.
Over decades, Lee Isaacs has become one of Boulder’s top criminal defense attorneys, but lately she has a lot on her mind besides work. She’s about to turn 60, a number that gives her pause even though decades of taekwondo have kept her fit, if frequently bruised. She worries about her 84-year-old father. She misses her husband, Paul, who died five years ago. So when a woman begs Lee to defend her nephew Jeremy, Lee is initially reluctant. The 16-year-old is accused of—and confessed to—being part of a group of skinheads who stomped to death another young man when they found out he was gay. But as Lee gets information from her determined investigator, Carla, and then eventually from Jeremy, she thinks there may be a way to save Jeremy. Winer (The Furthest City Light, 2012), who was a criminal defense attorney for decades, brings vivid, insider knowledge of all things legal, from lawyers’ black humor to the importance of details to a jury. Unlike many dull legal novels, though, this is filled with witty dialogue, believable characters, and quick pacing (it's a sure bet that the author never bored a jury). Lee is complex, funny, grouchy, and ambitious. It’s just plain fun to hang out with her and her two gay friends; it’s fun to listen as she and her dad talk late at night. And it’s seriously impressive to watch her as a lawyer.
If she were real, Winer's heroine would be your hands-down first choice if you got in trouble. But as a lucky and hopefully law-abiding reader, you have the right to buy her next adventure and remain silent for hours as you speed through the pages.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61088-228-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
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
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