A well-plotted tale about family secrets with a plethora of suspense and intrigue.
A writer’s obsession leads to revenge in this debut mystery novel.
Bella Marx, a literature professor–turned–romance writer, pays an overdue visit to her estranged cousin, Katy, only to discover her dead in an apparent suicide. Katy struggled with mental illness, but Bella knows something is wrong, suspecting that the suicide may have been staged to coincide with her visit. She recovers a manuscript from her cousin’s derelict apartment and a short story about “a deranged matricide” that’s a haunting revision of one Bella and Katy composed years ago (“As undergraduates, Katy and I were zealous political moralists. Our story, if it had any purpose at all, was intended to illuminate social evils”). A series of subtle clues leads Bella on a hunt for answers to her questions surrounding Katy’s death. References to wolves, lost springs, and a darkness found in the margins of San Francisco’s long history take Bella to a modern-day boardinghouse and one step closer to the person who was terrorizing Katy. As Bella searches for the connection, consumed with finding answers, she must wade through her own family’s bleak history, delving into her alcoholic father’s past and digging into a hidden annuity that hints at something evil. Wood offers an engaging tale of fixation, retribution, and family riddles. She deftly weaves together a layered mystery, starting with a suicide that leads to missing manuscripts, mysterious packages, and several tragic deaths. Her prose is occasionally overworked, which results in some awkward phrasing such as “that she was perceptive I had seen at once when I met her for the first time.” Yet there are beautiful passages and moments of great insight: “I always feel apologetic when I talk to you about yourself. It seems like presuming.” In a quirky and arresting cast, the moody ocean, shadowy hills, and fickle weather of California make the setting one of Wood’s best supporting characters. Gloomy mornings and punishing rains reflect the heaviness found in much of the narrative. The gripping mystery’s reveal is handled splendidly, following a delicate dance of prodding questions and half answers. It provides closure without a clichéd fairy-tale ending, underscoring the reality of a world that encompasses grayness and moral ambiguity.
A well-plotted tale about family secrets with a plethora of suspense and intrigue.Pub Date: July 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-91639-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Sequoia Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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