A gripping, disturbing tale about the importance of love, acceptance and letting kids be kids.
A young girl’s paranormal gift—or is it a curse?—of sight makes her the target of a murderous madman in Landry’s (Mirror Deep, 2012) shadowy thriller.
Ten-year-old Emma inherited psychic powers from her paternal grandmother, Dottie, including the ability to see into the past and future and have out-of-body experiences. But the craft is a source of shame for her hotheaded father, who has made Emma suppress her skills and speak of them to no one. Her talents don’t stay secret for long, though. When Emma unintentionally sees a serial killer of young girls and reveals herself to him, she becomes his next intended victim. Suspecting something amiss, teacher Christina Tyler contacts her ex-boyfriend, detective Hank Apple, and Emma reluctantly begins to help him on the dangerous case. Landry’s characters are beautifully written, full of subtleties and complications. Emma in particular is superbly drawn—stoic, clever, yet still a child who will curl up with a teddy bear for comfort. Even when overwhelmed by fear, she displays an unassuming strength that makes her seem much older than her years. In fact, her maturity often surpasses that of the squabbling adults around her, especially her disappointing parents; her volatile father and bland mother largely remain unsympathetic even as they attempt to make up for the many years of not supporting their daughter. Emma’s aunt and maternal grandmother step up as dependable advocates for Emma, as do Christina and Hank, but all four are still flawed in their own ways. Christina and Hank find that their feelings for each other are rekindled as they fight to protect Emma’s secret while hunting down the crazed murderer. But go-getter Hank struggles with work-life balance and emotional vulnerability, and bighearted Christina has trouble forgetting a past infidelity, so theirs is a deliciously clumsy stumble toward a relationship. The stakes are high in this dark novel, but the story never feels overdone thanks to Landry’s nimble balancing act between supernatural mystery and stirring character drama.
A gripping, disturbing tale about the importance of love, acceptance and letting kids be kids.Pub Date: April 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0996044196
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Book Beatles LLC
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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