Set in the 1950s, Lindsay’s first work of fiction follows the adolescence of Sonny Mitchell as he and his buddies get into trouble, tinker with cars and grow up bit by bit.
This coming-of-age novel set in Willamette, Ore., tours the physical, emotional and, most importantly, vehicular landscapes of the 1950s as seen by young narrator Sonny, who’s always flanked by his gang of pals. The crew never tires of living up to the name given to them by a local curmudgeon: “little bastards.” Spinning an easygoing American tale, Sonny wheels his way around a fairly charmed youth, working on farms, drooling after cars and girls, and listening to rock ’n’ roll. As he and his posse get older, they find themselves deeply obsessed with the hot rod and drag racing scenes, and much of the drama of the novel unfolds around souping up cars and competing with peers for the titles of fastest and flashiest—not that there’s too much action moving the plot forward. Rather, Lindsay prefers to ruminate repeatedly on the fun and freedom of being a hot-rodding, blue-collar boy in the ’50s, a nostalgia clearly close to his heart. Despite the lack of action, the prose is breezy, and the novel will interest readers who lived through the era, particularly car lovers and especially men. Indeed, Lindsay focuses heavily on masculinity, sometimes so much so that a whiff of misogyny seems near. The fact that Sonny has a sister is mentioned just twice, and the hormones rage unchecked; at one point, Sonny describes checking out a girl at the pool with his friends as “weighing and judging like it was a meat auction.”
An easy though sometimes meandering bildungsroman best suited for dudes into cars, girls and teenage defiance.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1494356736
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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