Profound it ain’t, but immensely readable and very charming in its own messy, undisciplined way.
Four generations of strong-minded women battle each other, their individual insecurities and life’s many ups and downs in this overstuffed latest from Mapson (Goodbye, Earl, 2004, etc.).
The author gives her characters plenty of obstacles to overcome before the mostly happy ending. When we meet Mariah Moon, inching along in traffic on California’s Highway One, she’s just lost her job as assistant sociology professor at a local college. How will she pay for that fancy school attended by her brilliant 12-year-old daughter Lindsay? Waitressing at the Owl & Moon, her family’s Pacific Grove restaurant, is the short-term solution, but it means dealing with her cranky, ultra-religious grandmother, Gammy, and her maddening mother, Allegra. Mariah is mortified by Allegra still dressing and acting like a hippie chick at nearly 50, and she’s never forgiven her mother for refusing to identify the man who begot her 34 years ago. (Mariah at least told Lindsay the name of her absent father, even if the girl’s never met him.) Not to worry: When Allegra has a fainting spell that sends her to the hospital, the doctor who hands her a diagnosis of leukemia is none other than Alvin Goodnough, the Vietnam vet en route to med school with whom she shared a sleeping bag back in the Summer of Love. Will they finally get together for keeps? Can Mariah get over her eternal adolescent snit with the help of a handsome Scottish customer at the café? Will Lindsay’s science project win her a scholarship, or land her in jail? Mapson’s plotting is as over-the-top as it was in the Bad Girl Creek trilogy—Phoebe DeThomas’s daughter Sally turns up from that series to befriend Lindsay—and the twists are often blindingly obvious, poorly motivated, or both. What saves the story is the characters: broadly drawn, but utterly human, full of querulous life and irritatingly believable. The author loves the people she creates and draws in readers to share her affection.
Profound it ain’t, but immensely readable and very charming in its own messy, undisciplined way.Pub Date: July 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6641-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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