A moving novel about an unwavering affection that begins in a time of adversity.
In Jones’ debut historical novel based on actual events, a romance between a young mother and a pilot blossoms after a ship is stranded in South West Africa during World War II.
In 1942, Alison Habib travels to Cairo on the Dunedin Star, a cargo liner that also carries 12 passengers. She’s only 22 years old and is accompanied by her 18-month-old daughter and Egyptian husband. The ship strikes a sandbar unexpectedly and must be abandoned, so the passengers and crew brave tempestuous Atlantic waters until they reach the shore of South West Africa (now Namibia), called the Skeleton Coast. After multiple rescue missions fail, the survivors are forced to attempt a 700-mile overland trek to a military outpost. During one of the unsuccessful rescues, a pilot, Lt. Russell Townshend, lands on the beach in a B-25 bomber but is unable to take off again, stranding him with the others. Alison immediately feels drawn to the newcomer, and the two pass the time in rapt conversation. She keeps a diary of the experience, which she ultimately gives to one of her best friends—author Jones’ wife. In an extraordinary coincidence, Jones later orders a book about the shipwreck in 2003 from a bookstore owned by an elderly, infirm Townshend; he soon decides to give Townshend the diary as well as a letter that Alison wrote but never sent. Jones ambitiously braids several different narratives together into one coherent tapestry: Alison’s ordeal on the Dunedin Star; his wife Joanne’s friendship with her; his own history with his wife; and the attempt to communicate with Townshend in the twilight of his life. As a result, the story is a bit cramped, especially due to the fact that it’s so brief, but Jones is careful to avoid causing readers any chronological confusion. It helps that the tale is a powerfully dramatic one about survival in the face of unexpected danger and about a love that spanned decades. Lurking subtly but poignantly in the background is the author’s own love story, which seemingly inspires Alison to share a lifelong secret.
A moving novel about an unwavering affection that begins in a time of adversity.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6824-2
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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