An often emotionally insightful portrait of family life.
In Van Zanten’s (On Thin Ice, 2012) novel, a family with adopted children faces issues that threaten to tear them apart.
Sisters Shayla, 10, and Abby, 6, are too young to remember why they were taken away from their mother, Nora. All they know is that, one day, their social worker, Bernice Harrison, chaperones them to Nora’s funeral and then adopts them. Years later, three members of the Harrison family grapple quietly with their problems: Shayla, now 17, develops a shoplifting habit, worries that her two best friends like each other more than they like her, and wonders if her crush, Eric, reciprocates her feelings. Then Shayla’s half sister, Anna Michaud, contacts her, offering to introduce her to her birth father, Gabriel, and Shayla is thrilled at the prospect. Meanwhile, Bernice’s husband, Tom, grows increasingly attracted to his 25-year-old receptionist, Marla, and begins an affair with her. Bernice, for her part, feels besieged on all fronts. She worries that Shayla’s biological father, a shiftless addict the last time she saw him, won’t be a good influence on the young woman. (She and Shayla have dramatic, dayslong fights on the matter.) She also feels increasingly distraught about her marriage, as Tom keeps “working late” and declines to have sex with her. As Bernice’s, Tom’s, and Shayla’s troubles deepen and harsh truths come to light, the family’s bonds are tested. Despite Bernice’s unique position as Shayla’s former social worker, the story’s central problems—teen angst, infidelity—are fairly quotidian. But that very normalcy makes Van Zanten’s story all the more engrossing, as the characters work through their turbulent feelings and find solutions through mature discussion. Along the way, the author sensitively renders their emotions: “she pushed away thoughts about those confusing times of long ago; a pervasive sense of weariness always surfaced.” However, the reasons why Marla is attracted to her middle-aged boss are never explained, and the way that Shayla talks can be distracting: “Omigod, this is so excellent; like, I will have my dad back!”
An often emotionally insightful portrait of family life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Book Baby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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