A somewhat messy but satisfying ghost story for young readers.
A debut novel introduces a boy investigating the mysterious happenings in a Louisiana house.
Matt Franklin doesn’t want to have to stay with his aunt and uncle in the Louisiana swamp, but his busy parents don’t give him a choice. Don’t they care that they will miss his 12th birthday? When he gets to Louisiana, Aunt Eartha serves him gator nuggets while his cousin Lucy keeps disappearing into the house’s secret passageways. At least there’s a giant library—the biggest that Matt has ever seen: “Three floors high of all books. A stained glass, dome ceiling that’s allowing plenty of bright sunlight to pour in. Towards the right is a beautiful spiral staircase that gives you access to each floor.” It turns out that the house contains a massive bomb shelter beneath it, which explains all the extra space. Unfortunately, the shelter is the place where more than 100 people burned to death in 1829. When Lucy invites Matt to join her on an investigation into the mysterious smoke that they both have smelled in the area, he reluctantly agrees. That night, when they hear unusual noises coming from the library, Lucy and Matt sneak in and are confronted by an incredible sight: a real ghost. Unluckily for Matt, things only get spookier from there. At under 60 pages, this series opener, aimed at grades four to six, is a quick read that doesn’t have time to dally. Valentino writes in an energetic prose that keeps the story light, even if it’s not the best suited style for building subtle tension: “I’m sure you’re getting tired,” Aunt Eartha tells Matt the first night, “and we’re all usually in bed around here by 10:00, it’s safer. I mean, it’s better! Yeah, it’s...it’s better to get a good night’s rest is all.” While the backstory of the house is perhaps needlessly complex, the mystery should please young readers with its Scooby-Doo-esque mix of humor and creepiness. Matt and Lucy make a fun pairing, and the audience will get to enjoy their further adventures in the series’ next installment.
A somewhat messy but satisfying ghost story for young readers.Pub Date: April 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4840-3391-3
Page Count: 56
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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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