An intriguing but uneven tale involving the murder of a patriarch.
This debut historical novel chronicles a boy’s journey from his childhood home to an orphanage and the chain of events that leads him to change his name.
Stanley William Puchalski’s mother wakes him early one fall morning in 1920 in Southington, Ohio, to send him on the most urgent errand of his life—fetch the sheriff to investigate his father’s murder. It seems that a group of men broke into the family’s farmhouse to steal some money and shot the boy’s father, George, in his bedroom. Things haven’t always gone smoothly on the family farm. George was a harsh taskmaster for all the hands working there, even his wife, Stella, and young Stanley as well as the boy’s brothers and sister. All their hard work made George a well-off patriarch, but he didn’t share the rewards. He got drunk constantly and subjected his family to endless bursts of violent abuse. As the oldest son, Stanley wished he could step in, but he was too young to stand against Papa’s fury. That fateful evening, the boy heard a sharp crack in the middle of the night. Once the police arrive, Stella’s story starts to make less and less sense. The timing’s off, the supposed thieves sound a lot like family relatives, and there’s no trace of their car leaving the farm. And when Stella is arrested for the murder of her husband, there’s no one left to take care of Stanley and his siblings. The kids are put in the County Children’s Home, an orphanage in an old mansion, and the cruel caretakers and older bullies make the place seem like little improvement over life on the farm. In this novel based on his family’s history, Miller writes about his grandfather in a dramatic, vivid manner and a shifting third-person perspective. The author offers readers a fast-paced, cinematic tale that covers Stanley’s travails—which include changing his last name to Miller at the age of 13 and working in a Chicago steel mill—rather than a sober, minutiae-filled biography. Unfortunately, the book’s descriptive style is sometimes overwrought, which makes the prose sound overenthusiastic (“Her wavy chestnut curls flow softly in the gentle breeze, kissed by the afternoon sunlight creating shimmers of auburn highlights in her hair”).
An intriguing but uneven tale involving the murder of a patriarch.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-53161-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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