The novel hobbles itself with excessive details, but Lance’s journey is a lively, satisfying one.
Debut author Joevon presents an urban novel about an aspiring songwriter’s quest to transcend his surroundings.
When the reader first meets Lance Adams, he’s not happy. Lance wrote a smash song for the rapper J-Money and, although Lance received $10,000 for his efforts, he feels he deserves more (“He’s making MILLIONS off of my LIFE!”). As the reader learns, Lance’s life certainly makes for good hip-hop copy. He grew up in the Marcus Garvey Projects in Brooklyn surrounded by drug abuse and violence. He spent three years in prison and is quick to throw a punch. Now that he’s a free man, he dreams of making music and spends long hours at Barnes & Noble writing lyrics. At the bookstore, he meets the thoughtful Ayana, and they eventually have a son together. Lance looks to be on the right path, but his old troubles haunt him. His is a world where slighting the wrong person can end poorly, and drugs can drain resources and end lives in a flash. Lance points out the stupidity of stealing an iPhone, saying that the $700 phone isn’t worth the risk: “A crackhead can smoke that away in ten seconds!” Halfway through the story, following an incident with a gun, Lance enters a strange realm where he is taught various life lessons. He emerges as someone who has journeyed to the recesses of his own mind. He also emerges as a very different person. The excitement for the reader comes in finding out how Lance will succeed now that he is both physically and mentally changed. And there is plenty of excitement to be had: bullets fly, egos collide, and music is made even if the storyline sometimes sags with mundane details, including Polonius-like advice Lance gives his young son about borrowing money. The reader need not know so many specifics, but the payoff is with the protagonist. Lance is often down but will he ever be out? It’s a question that keeps the story moving until the very end.
The novel hobbles itself with excessive details, but Lance’s journey is a lively, satisfying one.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5136-1473-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Movement Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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