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SONOMA ROSE

Chiaverini’s latest Elm Creek Quilts novel revisits Prohibition-era California.

For Rosa Barclay, marriage to taciturn and occasionally violent postmaster John is hellish, despite the verdant Southern California valley where they live and farm. For reasons that are exhaustively (and needlessly for readers of a prequel, Quilter’s Homecoming) detailed in flashbacks, Rosa chose John over her true love, unreliable drunkard Lars, whose family owns the apricot orchards her own ancestors lost decades before. When her parents learn that Rosa’s first child, Marta, was actually Lars’, they disown her (although her mother visits secretly). Lars leaves town after a last tryst with Rosa. When she discovers valises crammed with cash in the barn, she wonders why John refuses to seek better medical treatment for a hereditary wasting disease (from John’s side of the family) afflicting their children Ana and Miguel. (Four other children died of the disease.) In fact, only Marta and 5-year-old Lupita are healthy, inflaming John’s suspicions about their paternity. His abuse of Rosa increases until a particularly savage beating forces Rosa and the children to flee. Equipped with some of John’s cash (proceeds of bootlegging, which leads to his arrest and imprisonment), Rosa rejoins a sober and penitent Lars. They consult a San Francisco specialist who correctly diagnoses the children’s condition. Under assumed names the fugitive family sets up housekeeping as hired hands at a Sonoma winery owned by the Cacchione clan. Like many vintners, the Cacchiones can’t wait out Prohibition without going bankrupt, unless they bootleg their wine. After a raid led by evil federal agent Crowell, and threatening letters sent by John from prison, Lars and Rosa “launder” John’s remaining cash by purchasing their own vineyard in Glen Ellen. How long before John, Crowell and the gangsters operating in Rosa's own backyard close in? Choked by repetitive exposition, the novel wheezes to life in the last 75 pages, only to end too abruptly.

 

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-525-95264-0

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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