Animal-loving romantics will forgive the uneven tone.
The sequel to Singer’s Still Life with Elephant (2007) follows our heroine home from a year in Africa, only to discover that home may simply be where the elephants are.
After breaking up with Tom Pennington, the millionaire animal activist who won her heart in the first novel, Neelie spends a year at a reserve in Kenya nurturing baby elephants. As she readies to return to New York, political strife in Kenya changes everything. Stranded at the airport she meets safari guide Diamond-Rose Tremaine, who manages to get the two of them to Zimbabwe, where Neelie falls hopelessly in love with an elephant the camp calls Tusker. His bad behavior has him targeted for execution, and she becomes determined to save him. In exchange for $35,000 to a corrupt official, Neelie and Diamond have three months to find Tusker a safe haven. The two make it back to New York, but both feel the constriction of suburban America. Neelie misses the baby elephants, and Diamond can’t wash the bush out of her soul. She rarely bathes, eats most meals with her knife, answers questions with Swahili proverbs and prefers sleeping on the floor to the challenge of untangling sheets. At the New York animal sanctuary where Neelie and Diamond work, its founder Mrs. Wycliff is faltering from dementia (but the funny, charming kind!) and is now on permanent safari. Tom saves the place and Neelie is convinced he’s the only one who can save Tusker, but he refuses. Is it out of spite? What are his secret plans for the sanctuary? Will Tom and Neelie reunite? The novel’s finale ignites romance between Tom and Neelie and between Diamond and Jungle Johnny, a children's-show conservationist. All’s well that ends well, but for the odd chords the novel strikes—from slapstick comedy (including a cursing parrot), to the seriousness of animal poaching and corruption in Africa, to the fairly predictable romantic mix-ups between Tom and Neelie.
Animal-loving romantics will forgive the uneven tone.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-171377-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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