An engrossing but disjointed tale about familial love.
Four struggling children try to deal with a mentally ill mother in this debut novel.
Jasmine Anderson is a hustler and survivor. Her husband’s death left her with four kids—Molly May, Myron, Joey, and Allie—and little means to support them in Columbus, Ohio. Jasmine is a believer in self-help books and vision boards. Molly May tells readers: “Mom likes to say that we’re a goal-driven family on an upward trajectory.” But her children see no future success with the constant fighting, no father, and little supervision. The family fractures when Allie, the eldest, leaves home; her departure inflames her mother’s illness (“The physical symptoms that began twenty years ago are acute when I’m stressed, and there is nothing more stressful than being abandoned by your child,” Jasmine notes). Then Molly May develops deafness in one ear and Allie suffers an assault and returns home. (The retired janitor who found Allie on a bench “believes she was stabbed and beaten, maybe more.”) After Myron lands in juvenile detention for his part in a youthful stunt that kills a friend, Allie can no longer watch her family implode and becomes the matriarch. She essentially kicks her mother out of a household she no longer wishes to be responsible for (“You girls can raise the boy better than I did,” Jasmine asserts, referring to Myron). With supervision and structure, the children all achieve stable jobs and become the unlikeliest success stories. The narrative then jumps ahead to 2029, when Jasmine is released from prison in California for identity fraud. Armed with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, she must decide if she can confront her children, apologize for the chaos and abandonment, and finally heal her family. In this ambitious and absorbing novel, Knox fully commits to her stark depiction of a dysfunctional family fractured by mental illness. The author delivers a grim, realistic tale with rich details that deftly show Jasmine’s flaws. When Allie returns home after the attack, she is welcomed with an acerbic comment from her mother: “One deaf, one dumb. What did I do to deserve this?” But at times, this family’s intense suffering and arduous journey make for a difficult read. And some readers may find the timelines that jump around and the frequent narrative shifts off-putting.
An engrossing but disjointed tale about familial love.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73308-987-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: AUXmedia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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