by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2015
Despite a lack of editorial gumption, this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.
A three-generation family chronicle by a first-time writer inspired by her grandmother’s diary and published by a small press operated by college students might not entice the average reader, but it works out surprisingly well.
Charley Beck, a young technician at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, falls in love with Emma, a post office clerk, daughter of a drunken ex–Civil War doctor. At 37 and well into spinsterhood, she cannot believe her luck, but Charley is the real thing. This being 1893, they marry after a long courtship and combine their savings to build a house. Their only child, Lillie, beautiful and brilliant but no feminist, grows up to marry Ferd, also a Bureau employee. He moves in; Lillie bears nine children and never doubts her good fortune until she dies of pneumonia in 1933. The author creates believable characters whose lives contain plenty of passion and tragedy, but, despite a Washington, D.C., setting, great events pass with barely a mention. Yet history itself is the novel’s best feature. The author has done her homework, infusing her work with convincing details of 19th- and early-20th-century city life, courtship, work, domestic routine (brutal for a woman), education, and medicine. Life was hard even for the middle class; fortunately they didn’t realize it. Readers will easily follow as the author jumps back and forth between generations, but they may drift off during long excerpts from diaries and letters. Whether fiction or not, they read like the real thing: verbose, repetitious, and mostly preoccupied with trivia.
Despite a lack of editorial gumption, this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62720-039-4
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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