by Karen Novak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000
Novak’s striking debut works up to a climactic frenzy whose deepest revelations aren’t about mysterious Eleanor, but about...
A hundred years after a frightful murder spree leaves a New England house haunted, an equally haunted woman arrives from the city destined in spite of herself to break the curse—or repeat it.
Her nerves worn to shreds by repeated exposure to child-abuse cases, Detective Leslie Stone snapped one day, shooting the police suspect in the killing of a little girl. Exonerated on murder charges by a temporary insanity plea, she’s just emerging from a mental institution when her contractor husband Greg is invited to the insular town of Wellington to supervise the restoration work on Five Mile House, fallen into disuse and disrepair ever since Eleanor Bly killed six of her seven children and then leapt to her death from an upper window. Greg has never done this sort of work before; his sole qualification is Leslie herself, a double for the fearsome Eleanor Bly. As Leslie settles queasily into a new routine, taking Wellington family attorney Phillip Hogarth as her lover and volunteering three mornings a week at the Wellington Historical Society, she realizes that Eleanor Bly, whose spirit haunts Five Mile House (and, ever more insistently, the narrative) who longs for the rescuer she sees in Leslie, isn’t the only thing disturbing about Wellington. Gwendolyn Garrett, the historical consultant who first sought Greg for the job, is a practicing witch hot on the trail of a cabalistic volume called the Analecta Seriatus; most of the other women in Wellington seem to be members of her coven; and the town’s history is so closely bound up with its most notorious figure that Harry and Diana Wellington plan to refurbish the place as a Witches of Wellington theme park (think Colonial Williamsburg redesigned by Nathaniel Hawthorne).
Novak’s striking debut works up to a climactic frenzy whose deepest revelations aren’t about mysterious Eleanor, but about Leslie and the loyalties she once took for granted. (Author tour)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58234-096-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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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