A slowly paced entry in a trilogy that deals with the aftermath of abuse.
The second volume of Edward’s (The Constant Child, 2012) trilogy follows Joy Chambers, nee Martina Cambridge, who has moved to Berger, Mo., after fleeing her abusive husband.
Martina has settled into a new life in a small town, and although the horrors of her life in Texas have not left her, she nevertheless manages to lead a fulfilled life. She owns a successful business and is in a committed relationship with her childhood sweetheart, Augie. At the outset of the novel, Martina’s husband, Ray, has managed to track her down and break into her house. She informs the police, and he is sent to prison. Martina suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and with the encouragement of her boyfriend and his sister Janelle, she seeks professional help to move past her previous traumas. Initially, Martina operates solely under the pseudonym of Joy Chambers, but after her husband goes to prison, she comes clean about her past and her true identity to her friends and neighbors in Berger, which is a step forward on her path of recovery. The novel tracks the aftermath of the abusive relationship and the steps Martina takes to heal psychologically. The plot is somewhat sluggish since it closely follows the undramatic, steady progress of emotional healing. Despite the serious nature of the subject matter, the tone tends toward the dry and overly expository: “He may have intended to tie me up and cut on me as he got high; maybe killing me afterwards,” Martina says. “Instead of that happening, however, I was able to give him a mild concussion, break his nose, loosen four of his front teeth, and ensure that he was finally put into police custody after years of evading capture.” In addition, sudden narrative shifts can be confusing, particularly when Martina’s first-person perspective switches to a more distanced third-person narration.
A slowly paced entry in a trilogy that deals with the aftermath of abuse.Pub Date: July 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484814369
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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