An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.
A sequel focuses on a gay student coming into his own in early 1980s Detroit.
After an adolescence filled with fear and self-loathing, Jamie Goldberg has finally decided to come out of the closet. The college student chooses to do so the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1980 in the kitchen of his parents’ home in Northwest Detroit. “There,” narrates Jamie ruefully, “homosexuality scored another decisive yet Pyrrhic victory.” Despite his mother’s lifetime of involvement in progressive politics, she reacts with anger and disgust. His father asks him to leave, telling him, “Don’t come back until you’re cured.” Now that his parents are no longer paying for school, Jamie switches to his preferred major, theater, and throws himself into the work. He begins to experiment with his newfound freedom, but he still has concerns with the way others perceive him as well as learning hard lessons about love and sex. Jamie begins to develop a reputation for promiscuity after an incident involving his crush, Casper Tyres, and he starts to explore—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—the world of cruising. In certain bathrooms and parks, with acquaintances and strangers, Jamie finally becomes intimate with the peculiar and often frightening world of male sexuality. It’s made all the more difficult by the fact that he still has not yet reckoned with the act that initiated his sexual life: the rape he suffered as a young boy. As Jamie’s sex life quickly escalates to new heights, he realizes that he hasn’t found himself by coming out of the closet. In order to realize who the real Jamie Goldberg is, he still has a lot of work to do.
Taylor’s prose is smooth and often striking, creating memorable images that will stick in readers’ minds as much as they do in that of the impressionable Jamie: “We got in this old boat-like white Cadillac and drove down Woodward. Detroit, that late at night, resembled a demilitarized zone after curfew. Stores with thick metal bars; offices with small if any windows, protected by iron rails; and the occasional empty burned-out lot left exactly as it was after the 1968 riots.” The author skillfully portrays Jamie’s claustrophobic sense of himself in the world, beset on one side by the homophobia that constantly threatens his well-being and on the other by the lusts of men who do not have his best interests at heart. Between this rock and a hard place, Jamie festers in a stew of confusion and self-disgust. The book has a narrower time frame than the previous volume in the series, covering only a six-month period from 1980 to ’81. While the condensed period helps make the tale more palatable, there is still just too much of it. At over 400 pages,the book is bloated by superfluous scenes and redundant episodes, feeling more diaristic than novelistic on occasion. Taylor succeeds in capturing a time and place in Jamie’s life, but the story would likely have had a greater impact if the author had managed to show less of it.
An overlong but powerful tale of one young man’s sexual awakening.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73429-570-2
Page Count: 414
Publisher: ArnoLand Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fairy tale stuffed with a meaningful moral, this is a funny and heartwarming novel.
A good Italian American daughter’s 30-something rebellion forces her entire family to reckon with their choices, resulting in a happily-ever-after for all that’s like the best affogato: rich, bitter, sweet.
Giuseppina “Jess” Capodimonte Baratta lives in her parents’ basement, and it’s not the finished kind, but more like an old-fashioned cellar with a bed and a dresser. Her family has long struggled with money problems, so many that Jess had to go to community college instead of the four-year institutions her sister and brother attended. At 33, she’s landed back at her childhood home in Lake Como, New Jersey (known for its location between a lake and the Atlantic Ocean), because she’s left her husband, Bobby Bilancia, heir to Bilancia Meats and blue-eyed local heartthrob. Jess may not know what she wants for her life, but it isn’t nightly TV and then several kids with Bobby, whose idea of sophistication runs to capicola-ham rosettes. Then Uncle Louie, the proprietor of Capodimonte Marble and Stone who has mentored Jess as his deputy, dies of a heart attack and leaves the business in her hands. Unfortunately, there’s also some funny business that includes a side hustle with an associate known as “Googs” and a quarry’s worth of unpaid taxes. Jess chooses to ignore her overbearing mother’s advice and fly to Carrara, the home of the world’s most beautiful stones—and stonemasons, like Angelo Strazza, whose specialty is applying fragile gold leaf to carved pieces. From brushing up on her Italian to investigating Uncle Louie’s somewhat mysterious past, Jess soon discovers she needs less of her family’s assistance than she or they ever believed. Trigiani risks gilding the lily here, but by placing Jess’ love affair with Angelo alongside her love affair with her own future, she maintains a balance that will leave readers as satisfied as an Italian Sunday dinner would.
A fairy tale stuffed with a meaningful moral, this is a funny and heartwarming novel.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593183359
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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