Complicated and compelling, but it stumbles navigating several heavy themes.
In Pfaltz’s (Flash’s Song, 2015, etc.) thriller, a prison psychologist works with an inmate who refuses to speak.
Dr. Eleanor Hartley, head psychologist at a women’s state penitentiary in Virginia, takes on a new patient dubbed “Jane Doe” who is convicted of murdering a drug dealer and a cop. This mysterious woman provokes a series of questions—Why would she kill someone? Why won’t she reveal her name? And why won’t she talk? Eleanor becomes increasingly infatuated with Jane and risks both her marriage and job to save her. The psychologist’s husband, Lewis, feels disconnected from his patient-obsessed wife, and Cory, Eleanor’s best friend, cites this as the reason Lewis cheated. “You don’t see to his needs!” says Cory. “You haven’t for years!” The novel comprises three sections and opens in October 2015. As the narrative unfolds, the reader learns of Eleanor’s relationship with her patients, her crumbling marriage, and Jane’s mysterious silence. In addition to a detailed portrait of Eleanor, Pfaltz introduces a seemingly unrelated plotline that takes place in 2014 and is centered around Sylvie Marshall, an inquisitive volunteer at an animal shelter who suspects foul play by a cop, taking matters into her own hands to get to the truth. Ultimately, the two threads connect in the third act. Eleanor’s progress with Jane fosters a fragile but growing trust and romance between the women. Pfaltz tackles intersecting and diverging subjects—prison life, mental illness, animal cruelty, etc. While engaging, the multiple weighty topics hobble the storytelling. The characters, however, are dynamic, fleshed out with compelling detail. Even minor cast members shine, like Shina Jones, a savvy inmate who tries to regain control over her life by expanding her vocabulary.
Complicated and compelling, but it stumbles navigating several heavy themes.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-85354-2
Page Count: 510
Publisher: Arcadia Roseland
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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