A young man's trip to hell and back for true love, told with a quirky combination of brutality and charm.
Trouble abounds when a young man makes a terrible miscalculation, then pursues the love of his life in an effort to set things right.
Young Jesus has the cards stacked against him. His schizophrenic mother gave him an unusual name and a tragic incident of child abuse has scarred him, both physically and emotionally. The vivacious and hypersexed girl next door, Maddie, has set her sights on Jesus and nothing will dissuade her, not even her ultrareligious mother's fire-and-brimstone warnings about men. But when Jesus says the wrong thing at the wrong time, Maddie takes off, setting in motion a catastrophic chain of events. After she leaves Jesus, Maddie finds herself in the wrong neighborhood of Cottondale. Her naive head is turned by George, a narcissistic sociopath living large on the wrong side of the law, doing others' dirty work and delivering unsuspecting victims to a sadistic albino hermaphroditic serial killer known as The Sole Taker, who lives alone in an isolated mansion. George grabs Maddie and sells her to a prostitution ring. Meanwhile, Jesus tries to find her with the assistance of a motley crew of friends, including a well-meaning barkeeper and her sexually precocious daughter, a pair of prostitutes with hearts of gold and a biker-cum-older brother figure. As Maddie and Jesus work their way back to each other and inadvertently ever closer to The Sole Taker, the themes of love, family and forgiveness are explored with jazzy prose and gorgeous examples of metaphor. Leverett sets a few disturbingly graphic scenes that include violence, sex and child abuse amidst a vivid and dynamic cast of characters with big personalities involved in a satisfying crime tale, À la Pulp Fiction. The star-crossed lovers at the center of the plot are highlighted against a gritty story about the dark side of Cottondale. Although infused with a generous dose of black humor, this tale is, at its heart, strikingly sentimental.
A young man's trip to hell and back for true love, told with a quirky combination of brutality and charm.Pub Date: July 28, 2008
ISBN: 978-1432729561
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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