An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.
In Krantz’s debut middle-grade tale, best friends face a moral quandary that threatens to destabilize their friendship.
In 1968, in New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood, 13-year-old Stella Bellarosa is overwhelmed by her large, overbearing family. Her parents are always fighting, her sister’s always grandstanding, and her grandparents are always hovering. She faces additional pressures at her Catholic school, and she dreams of winning a scholarship to a Catskills boarding school. However, Stella would only be happy there if her 13-year-old best friend, Pin Pin Yang, a child of Chinese immigrants, attends with her. The girls bond over their similar family dynamics. Pin Pin is worried about purchasing a suitably extravagant present for her baby sister, and her solution is to steal a wallet from one of the nuns—an idea that Stella feels is morally indefensible. Together, they try to slip it back into the nun’s purse, but they’re caught, and Stella takes the blame and the resulting suspension. She’s angry at Pin Pin and also worries about her own relationship with her mother and father and whether they “could stop fighting for once and love me enough to forgive me.” Pin Pin skips school with Stella and they have a grand day out in the city, which clarifies their deep bond. Krantz’s novel portrays immigrant communities of New York in compelling detail, and it effectively depicts the struggles of the girls, who have different personas in school and at home. However, although the book is billed as a middle-grade novel, the complexity of the language puts it firmly at a YA level; there’s also occasional vulgarity (“I’m gonna kick your ass”), and one character makes offensive remarks about Chinese people. A significant amount of Italian dialogue isn’t adequately translated, as well, and the author overuses italics in a way that’s distracting and disruptive.
An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-90303-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: purple pie press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 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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