Somber but absorbing tale, thanks to a likable protagonist and fully imagined setting.
A new social worker worries her colleagues may be murdering child abusers in Wirth’s (Day of the Dead, 2017, etc.) thriller.
Recent college graduate Jennifer Reilly is excited for her first field assignment after three months working at Child Protective Services. She initially works closely with Kelly “K-Bond” Bond, a highly regarded child-abuse investigator. Jennifer soon befriends other colleagues who deal with cases of child abuse, like Detective Diane Gill of the Riverside Police Department. The group meets at a local bar for drinks and discussions about the most appalling cases. Gill suggests calling themselves the Karma Klub after abusive parents—from a case the detective investigated—turn up as victims of torture with injuries similar to their maltreated infant. An apparent avenger is targeting others as well, some just out of prison and many who don’t survive the encounter. Jennifer is content with her new career and her doting boyfriend, Joe Carpenter. But she’s shaken by the discovery of evidence that seemingly implicates someone she works with. And it’s quite possibly more than one colleague because the killer isn’t working alone. Searching for the culprit(s) with Joe’s help, Jennifer may not like what she finds. Wirth handles the story’s grave subject matter respectfully. Characters, for example, are unmistakably affected by their experiences and care about what happens to the kids. There are likewise various forms of abuse, from physical to neglect, and different outcomes for CPS investigations (one leads to a loving, abuse-free household). But while Jennifer eyes quite a number of suspects, most readers, privy to more details than the protagonist, won’t have trouble naming a killer. Still, it’s a delight watching Jennifer investigate; she furtively peruses desks at CPS and even has to duck and crawl away when someone unexpectedly arrives. The prose doesn’t linger on violent imagery, though it’s abundantly clear what’s taken place, whether it involves children or culpable parents.
Somber but absorbing tale, thanks to a likable protagonist and fully imagined setting.Pub Date: April 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946920-44-7
Page Count: 324
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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