by Jessica Barksdale Inclán ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003
Muted, poignant drama with an immensely appealing depth, plain grace—and echoes of Inclán’s Her Daughter’s Eyes (2000).
A fault line opens—and a troubled family is torn apart.
Peri MacKenzie must care for her severely handicapped child without much help after her selfish husband decamps, but she does so with heart and humor . . .until the day she disappears. Then her precociously maternal daughter Carly takes over, carefully feeding five-year-old Brooke through a tube, cleaning and diapering her paralyzed body, and cheering her up with TV cartoons. Faithfully following Peri’s routine, right down to greeting her sister every morning with the wry “Hello, Exceptional Individual,” Carly wonders when her mother will come back—never doubting her return. But she doesn’t. Not wanting to cause trouble for her beleaguered family, resigned to receiving no help from her mostly oblivious 15-year-old brother, Carly gets by, hoping Brooke won’t spike a fever, as she frequently does. When the thermometer reveals a temperature that Tylenol won’t bring down, she calls on neighbor Rosie Candelero, a nurse, for help, and at last the social workers arrive. The little girl is found to have bedsores and other ailments, though it’s clear that Carly did her best. Eventually, Peri’s ex-husband Graham shows up—not that he’s immediately willing to admit any responsibility for driving his unwanted former family into near poverty. Someone else is going to have to be a hero. He couldn’t do it when Brooke was born and he can’t do it now. Then Peri’s father Carl returns, more or less out of the blue. A well-off, retired real-estate agent, Carl abandoned Peri and her mother Janice long ago, and now regrets it. He sees the situation as his chance to make amends and redeem himself, though Janice has been dead for several years and Peri is now in a mental institution (that’s where she’s gone) after a suicide attempt. Yet slowly—ever so slowly—the family begins to heal.
Muted, poignant drama with an immensely appealing depth, plain grace—and echoes of Inclán’s Her Daughter’s Eyes (2000).Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-451-20787-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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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