An often intriguing story, despite a few too many plot elements, that shows the disparate ways that speech therapy can help...
In Jay’s debut novel, a speech therapist moves to the small town of Tungston, Pennsylvania—locally known as “Tungs”—and finds colorful characters and a little mystery.
At 24, Marleigh Benning’s life is in upheaval: after the sudden death of her mother and father, she discovers they weren’t actually her biological parents. It turns out that she was adopted at the age of 2, and all she knows now are her biological parents’ names and her own original birthplace: Tungs. Impulsively, she pulls up stakes in California and moves to the tiny town, pursuing her ongoing dream of helping people with speech problems. Her patients are a motley crew, such as raspy-voiced Ivory, who won’t stop gossiping long enough to let her vocal cords rest; Luella, who lives with her sister, Margritte, in a trailer full of chickens, trying to avoid another bout of aspiration pneumonia; and Melvin, whose ability to speak was twisted by a stroke and who now can only curse. Another patient, Casey, is a little boy who’d rather act like a dog and babble nonsense than speak to his frustrated mother, who isn’t thrilled by Marleigh’s fix-it attitude. There’s also Beryl Holmes, a cantankerous veteran who refuses to work with Marleigh when she accidentally lets his beloved (and deaf) dog loose. As if all this wasn’t enough, police are seeking a fugitive in the area, there have also been wolf sightings of late, and Marleigh is falling for hunky local fireman Lawyer Hunt—or possibly local doctor Parker York. Marleigh’s patients come across as three-dimensional people, and the details of her speech therapy work are fascinating, aided as they are by Jay’s real-life years in the field. Other aspects of the novel, however, are a little lackluster. Both the romance and the mystery seem unnecessary, for example. It also doesn’t seem plausible that Marleigh wouldn’t immediately start searching for information about her birth parents—particularly when it’s the primary reason for her move.
An often intriguing story, despite a few too many plot elements, that shows the disparate ways that speech therapy can help people regain their voices.Pub Date: May 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9961950-6-5
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Hedgehog & Fox
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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