A sweet but uneven tale about family and class.
A girl gets the chance to help her family and see how the affluent live in this debut YA novel.
Growing up in “one of the poor areas of San Carlos, a bustling and progressive Latin American city,” Juanita, 16, often takes care of her six younger siblings while her parents, Teresa and Eduardo, work. Despite their poverty, the couple have taught their children to carry themselves with dignity and kindness—but the realities of the neighborhood outside their loving home can be grim. Encounters with dangerous criminals and a lack of money to pay for hospital visits are part of everyday life. Juanita dreams of being able to get a job to help her parents and eventually lift the entire family out of poverty. She tries several times in vain to convince them to let her work at the local convenience store, but they refuse. Then one day, a large limousine enters the neighborhood by mistake. The rich Don Mendez comes into the family’s life with a proposition that could change everything. Juanita bears such a strong resemblance to Mendez’s dead daughter that he wants to bring her home with him and serve as her foster parent. In exchange, he will assist the struggling family. As Juanita enters the wealthy world of Mendez and his wife, one filled with lush decor and foie gras, she begins to question her own worth and fear of being naturally inferior. Always helpful, logical, and striving to do the right thing by her family, Juanita is an admirable role model for teen readers, and her insecurities will certainly ring true for many adolescents. But while Juanita, her family, and even Mendez are benevolent and likable in Marasigan’s charming series opener, their characterizations sometimes fall flat. “What do we need to do in order to prevent this thing from happening again?” Juanita asks her siblings after a very traumatic incident, making her sound less like a real person and more like a two-dimensional example of proper babysitting. The book also ends rather abruptly. The sequel will presumably explore the potential tensions between Juanita’s two very different worlds in greater depth.
A sweet but uneven tale about family and class.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4988-5
Page Count: 153
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
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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