A coming-of-age story that deftly demonstrates the potency of standing up for one’s beliefs.
The times, they are a changin’ in Arkansas in this third installment of a series.
This volume picks up immediately after Book 2, with Julie Morgan struggling in the wake of her baby’s birth and her mother’s recent death in 1957. When Julie flees Happiness House, a home for unwed mothers, and heads to El Dorado, she leaves behind her baby and postpones any real decision about her future. Julie wants to reclaim her old life, but she physically and emotionally can’t be the same girl. She is now a young woman who not only lost her mother, but is also a mom herself. While she secretly lived in Happiness House, her half sister and look-alike, Carmen, assumed Julie’s identity in El Dorado. Now Julie must live as Carmen and adapt to high school as an outsider. Early on, Julie muses: “This deception business will take some getting used to.” Most difficult of all, Julie only has 90 days to decide whether she wants to bring her baby home and become a social pariah or forfeit her parental rights and give her son up for adoption. In addition to Julie’s personal challenges, current events are front and center in the novel. El Dorado, like the entire nation, is riveted by the forced integration of Little Rock Central High School, and racially charged discussions are unavoidable in the conservative Southern town. Rascoe Keenan’s (In Those Dazzling Days of Elvis, 2017, etc.) decision to include two African-American characters, women whom the white protagonist counts as friends, provides a desperately needed perspective for Julie and readers. This is the strongest book in The Days of Elvis series so far, as the characters are well-developed and the focus on national events gives added weight to the small-town story. The underlying thread running through the engrossing narrative is power and the struggle against judgment and oppression. When Elvis, a wise fairy godfather at this point, tells Julie, “It’s too bad the woman has to pay for the consequences of a natural thing between two people who love each other,” he gets right to the heart of this tale.
A coming-of-age story that deftly demonstrates the potency of standing up for one’s beliefs.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68313-173-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Pen-L Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
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
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