by Katherine Towler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2002
Almost like an offshore Peyton Place at times, but also a well-crafted tale, subtle and memorable, that should have a broad...
Sensitive debut novel (selected by Barnes & Noble for its Winter Discover Program) about a young woman’s coming of age during WWII on an island in Narragansett Bay.
Snow Island, off Rhode Island, is not especially remote, but in the 1940s it is still without telephones and only recently has gotten electricity. There's only one store, run by Evelyn Daggett—or, rather, by Evelyn’s infinitely more efficient daughter Alice. The Daggett shop, like most of Snow Island, lives off the summer trade and gets by on credit for the rest of the year, for there are fewer than a hundred full-year residents to make up their trade. These include a fair share of oddballs, like the quahogger Owen Pierce, who practically lives on his boat and has a personal anecdote on just about any subject. There are also the usual dark scandals, like that of the Tibbits sisters, Grace and Bertha, who were found dead (one by suicide, the other of natural causes) in their twin houses one day in 1919 by their nephew George, a mainlander who has made an annual pilgrimage back ever since. It’s not a very exciting place to grow up, but Alice enjoys running the shop and acting as postmistress, and she finds herself more and more drawn to handsome Ethan Cunningham, an island boy who went off to college and returned to look after his sick mother after his father died. Alice’s best friend is Lydia Giberson, whose brother Pete is in love with Alice. But Alice becomes Ethan’s lover instead, discovering only after he moves away that she's pregnant. Pete offers to marry her, but Alice arranges to give the child up for adoption. Eventually she discovers that Ethan is married, while Pete is soon to ship off with the Navy. Should she really give the baby up?
Almost like an offshore Peyton Place at times, but also a well-crafted tale, subtle and memorable, that should have a broad appeal.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-01-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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