Cast against the hardships of everyday life in Singer’s Trailer Park, a young girl's troubled thoughts make for a...
In the still of the night, a young girl sees a man, who seems familiar, carelessly toss a baby down a well.
The poor African-American community that calls Singer’s Trailer Park in Bledsoe, Mississippi, home shuns the well. Although they know Gilroy Hassle murdered the child, no one is surprised when he gets a slap on the wrist rather than a murder charge. After all, black families don’t matter much to the local police force. They haven’t much respect for the mother, Pearletta, either. Born to successful parents, she fell prey to drugs, married the ne’er-do-well Gilroy, and sought comfort in the arms of another man: Solemn Redvine’s father. Solemn suspects the child may be her kin, but discovering the truth may cost her her sanity. After witnessing the murder, Solemn begins hallucinating, even hearing the baby speak at her own funeral. Then Pearletta disappears. Justin Bolden, the only black officer on the local police force, had spent time answering drunken phone calls from grief-stricken Pearletta, so when she vanishes, his interest is piqued, particularly since she was last seen in a hotel room, back in the thrall of cocaine and accompanied by a red-haired man—a man a little too similar to the owner of the land underneath the trailer park. Buckhanon (Conception, 2008, etc.) crafts a hypnotic tale, poetically conjuring the intricate workings of Solemn’s thoughts and ghostly visitations. Will Solemn be able to rise above the circumstances of her impoverished beginnings? Will she be able to rise above the discovery of her father’s infidelity? As Solemn’s troubles compound, veering inexorably toward a crime that shockingly severs father from daughter, Buckhanon deftly ratchets up the tension.
Cast against the hardships of everyday life in Singer’s Trailer Park, a young girl's troubled thoughts make for a heartbreaking story of broken promises.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09159-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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