A startling, sometimes-chilling tale of mental illness and familial abuse.
Mitchell’s debut novel is an autobiographical account of a young lad in a broken home, living in poverty and surrounded by death and madness.
In 1960s England, 5-year-old John has already experienced life’s worst: He’s watched relatives die, suffered the abuses of an alcoholic father and contended with poverty—all while living in a dilapidated home. But it gets worse. John’s older sister, Margueretta, locks him in the cellar, where he believes something hides in the dark with him. As the boy moves closer to adulthood, he continues to fall victim to Margueretta, who beats him often and slowly becomes unhinged. The ghosts in the author’s book are metaphorical, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of this powerful narrative, which is both a coming-of-age story for John and a blistering chronicle of his sister’s physical and psychological torment of him. The novel also portrays more typical adolescent scenes, like John and his friend, Danny, trying their best to see girls’ knickers or a teacher answering male students’ anonymous and detailed questions about sex. But these plotlines work best as amusing reprieves—not from “that thing in the corner” awaiting John in the cellar, but from the reason he’s in the cellar in the first place. Margueretta’s behavior toward her little brother is despicable; she verbally degrades him, pulls his hair and spits on him. But as the story progresses, Margueretta is more and more terrifying. She starts hearing voices that tell her to kill herself, which she attempts to do with a bread knife. John’s life in a poor family brims with poignant scenes that are both bleak and tongue-in-cheek: John and his twin sister, Emily, visit Auntie Dot, who’s unfazed by either cat hair in the kids’ food or an unlabeled can, donated by church members, and its most unwelcome contents. But it’s Margueretta who leaves the strongest impression, and this is no more forcefully emphasized than when John, seeing his sister’s face during a psychotic episode, says, “Now I know what the Devil looks like.” The title suggests a ghost story, but a boy witnessing firsthand the onset and evolution of a mental breakdown is as bloodcurdling as anything supernatural, perhaps more so.
A startling, sometimes-chilling tale of mental illness and familial abuse.Pub Date: May 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615793207
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Inclusic
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2013
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
