An excellent read. Let’s hope there’s more to come.
Welcome to the Idaho Territory of 1872, where a boy and his father eke out a livelihood. If the winters don’t kill you, the claim jumpers might.
Novelist Dorris (Sheepeater: To Cry For a Vision, 2009, etc.) tells of Samuel (never Sam) Chambers and his father, Charles, who have come from Iowa to mine enough gold to return to and improve the farmstead, where Samuel’s mother and little sister wait. Samuel is 14, but he’s a mature, resourceful 14. Yet this beautiful if harsh land is unforgiving country, both in terms of nature and bad guys. He and his father work like dogs at their claims, only to have those claims jumped not once, but twice. There are decent people, too. On their horseback travels, Samuel meets the lovely Bonnie McCracken, and they fall in love. Samuel’s rival is the crude, treacherous Rex Callahan, a ranch hand at Slate Creek, but eventually, Samuel spares his miserable life, and Rex quits the territory. There are also many Chinamen in the territory; unsurprisingly, no love is lost between them and the whites. But Samuel has befriended them, especially another boy named Chen. Even Charles, a basically good man, grudgingly grants the Chinamen respect, but only on his son’s say-so. In a dramatic, hair-raising trek, Samuel and Chen elude but then face the claim jumpers, and later, Samuel and his father face even more claim jumpers. Dorris, a confident storyteller, writes notably well. He’s not afraid to dwell on detail as the coming-of-age tale slowly unwinds, keeping readers’ interest all the while. He knows gold mining, too, so readers should be prepared to learn a lot about placer mining, hard rock mining, assaying, and so forth. There are no cardboard cutouts here; even minor characters are well-drawn. In the end, the moral universe is put to rights, but—importantly—nothing comes easily.
An excellent read. Let’s hope there’s more to come.Pub Date: March 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491721322
Page Count: 404
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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