A charming story about rediscovering connections, well-suited for readers who believe in destiny.
Two women cross paths during the Vietnam War, with their actions still reverberating 30 years later.
Novelist Florence (Jaybird’s Song, 2017) tells her tale through the alternating perspectives of three characters. In the 1970s, Mandy Rooks is living on an Army base while her husband is stationed in Vietnam. She is befriended by a woman named Ginger, whose husband is also fighting overseas. After Ginger has a one-night stand with Mandy’s brother, the two women seem irrevocably bonded. Then there is Rachel McCarthy, who is first introduced as she storms out of an office building in Atlanta in 1998. She has just quit her job at a dot-com startup. Reeling from her decision to resign, Rachel wanders into a fortuneteller’s den. Skeptical that anything the great Madam Sylvia will say is worth the money, she nonetheless submits to a tarot reading. The clairvoyant interprets various cards for her client, the most notable being the Three of Cups, which she says indicates there are three important women in Rachel’s life. Rachel can think of only her grandmother, Oodles, with whom she has a strong connection. She has a strained relationship with her mother, who lives across the country, and Rachel feels that the seer must be missing the mark. Though Rachel tries to forget the reading, clues have been spoon-fed to readers, indicating that Ginger and Mandy are the other important women referenced by the tarot card. The question that remains is how their lives relate to Rachel’s. Told through an accessible prose, this enjoyable tale is full of details about the early ’70s and late ’90s that feel true and informative about each era. The story is especially strong as it relates the difficulties faced by Army wives when their husbands disappear for months and years to fight a seemingly unending war. The descriptions of Army bases, cliquey military social circles, and the loneliness of single parenting are especially vivid. Although the novel’s “surprise” ending can be predicted many chapters before the facts are revealed, the tale is sufficiently entertaining that readers will likely put up with the lack of guesswork.
A charming story about rediscovering connections, well-suited for readers who believe in destiny.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9986781-2-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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