by K. M. Edwards ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2012
Best suited for readers who enjoy getting to know people through long, pleasant, one-sided exchanges over food and wine.
In Edwards’ debut novel, 62-year-old Marion von Muellerstahl relocates from Chicago to Berger, Mo., after the death of her husband to reconnect with family she hasn’t seen in nearly half a century.
The story begins as solitary Marion painstakingly remodels an old farmhouse with family history. Overly explanatory sentences shape the narrative as Marion reaches out to connect with long-lost friends and family. Exhaustive dialogue—usually over countless glasses of wine and tirelessly described dinners with new friends—affords the introspective heroine an opportunity to get out of her head as she settles into retirement. In spite of the many years that have passed since she was last in town, nearly every person Marion encounters welcomes her in with a warm, exceedingly polite and instant affection. These characters are so close to Marion that they read her mind, answering her unvoiced questions as soon as they arise. New friends and family share their personal lives, religious beliefs and thoughts on retirement and racism with an unbelievable affability. The most colorful character is Marion’s less-than-amiable adoptive cat, Snicklefritz, who expresses distaste for the slimy Dirk Dieckmann with a bite of his leg. This rambling story of congenial reunions is not completely without tension: There’s crime and mystery in Berger, after all. Most secrets are revealed in friendly conversations, and danger is brushed under the rug with tedious reassurances. Action scenes are diluted since they are indirectly related to readers. Long passages filled with emotion and apology can be tedious to read, but there’s a reward for those who stick with the narrative: The complicated weave of family ties starts to make sense. Secret identities and long-buried family scandals are uncovered and, like the rest of the story, easily absorbed. The final two chapters elevate the novel as Marion is finally thrust into real-time action. Perhaps the author presumes that readers, like Marion, need time and reassurance before confronting big emotions.
Best suited for readers who enjoy getting to know people through long, pleasant, one-sided exchanges over food and wine.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468121421
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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