Written in loose, loping prose, a story that’s entertaining enough, though in the end rather quietly routine.
A jazzy, fluent rendering of the life of an aspiring musician and composer who finds himself jailed for seven years just as his great love gives birth to their child.
Jasper’s third (after Dakota Grand, 2002, etc.) opens with Benjamin Baker, a young, bright African-American boy on the streets of DC, taking a job with Alfonse Mitchell, the successful owner of a neighborhood restaurant. Mitchell, seeing promise in the diligent Baker, invites him to assist in some shady late-night robberies—crimes that help support Mitchell’s enviably lavish lifestyle. Baker, who has become one of Mitchell’s most trusted lookouts during the residential robberies, finds himself entranced by Salamanca, Mitchell’s daughter. (As is Jasper’s writerly habit, there are no average women in his work: they are either pear-shaped, wise older women, or nodes of erotic desire, sweet young things with bustout bosoms and bottoms). Plunged into a deep love that thrums to the beat of Baker’s lively musical compositions, the couple begins to plan a future every bit as bright as their present circumstances foretell. But Baker is set up, takes the fall for Mitchell, and goes to jail shortly after Salamanca confides in him that she’s pregnant. Baker keeps his sanity while he’s inside by remembering Salamanca’s love and thinking about seeing her again—while Salamanca herself goes into hiding from her father, the man who took her lover down. After his release, Baker is tempted to rejoin his musician friends but stays true to his only meaningful goal: to find Salamanca and start things over. Yet the itch for revenge on Mitchell is strong, and though the old man eventually gets his due, Baker narrowly escapes disaster.
Written in loose, loping prose, a story that’s entertaining enough, though in the end rather quietly routine.Pub Date: July 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1675-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
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