An often addictive read with intimate settings and fine supporting characters, even if its protagonist is a bit too...
In Sider’s (The Things That Fall Away, 2013) novel, a privileged young woman’s life undergoes a radical shift when she’s sent to prison on trumped-up drug charges.
Abby Blackwood is an intelligent, beautiful yet aimless woman who’s floundering after high school. After offhandedly pointing out a drug dealer to an undercover cop, she unbelievably receives a five-year sentence at the Maysville Correctional Facility for Women. After initially trying to keep to herself by reading Neil Gaiman novels and taking long runs during yard time, she eventually makes new friends, including Mad T, her intimidating but illiterate suite mate; Sheronda, a savvy woman with a knack for gossip; and Grandma, an elderly gang leader who protects Christian inmates from sexual predators. Abby, who’s well-schooled in self-defense and small-town drama, finds herself uniquely suited to prison life, and her intelligence and pluck earn her respect from fellow inmates as well as guards. In fact, pretty-boy Sgt. Quinn’s subtle glances and restrained advances eventually lead to a secret affair. After Abby’s early release, she discovers the challenges of facing the world as both an ex-con and an expectant mother. Sider excels at portraying micro-communities, from the dynamic of Abby’s desultory life in small-town Springfield to the church-based, gossip-laden atmosphere of the town of Grayson, which she joins after her release. But the intricate hierarchy of the guards and prisoners in Maysville’s Unit B is most impressive; it’s a sexually charged but heartwarming place where morals, friendship and love matter as much as baser motivations. These memorable settings, and their respective supporting casts, are key to the novel, as Abby’s characterization is rather weak; she seems far too capable and self-aware, and she undergoes little dramatic change or growth. Instead, Abby merely weathers whatever conflict is thrust upon her in the moment, from her father’s death to the numerous obstacles she faces as she tries to reunite with Quinn.
An often addictive read with intimate settings and fine supporting characters, even if its protagonist is a bit too unshakeable.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1940950006
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Devilwood Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
