A solid coming-of-age tale that gets teen turmoil right.
A teenage girl adapts to a new home, town, and school while navigating her first romantic relationship in this YA novel with hints of the paranormal.
Sixteen-year-old Gentry never lived in one place long enough to make friends or find romance. Her father; his girlfriend, Nikki; and her brother, Rawson, are forced by financial circumstances to live with her great-aunt Tom (short for Tomasina) in Wiregrass, Georgia. Her dilapidated antebellum house is too much for the old woman to manage, so she welcomes them in, but she keeps confusing Gentry for her own daughter, Sylvie, who committed suicide at 16. Gentry dreads going to school until she meets heartthrob Legend Wallace, whom she deems a “Sirloin,” her “favorite cut of beef.” She thinks that pursuing him is futile, as he’s constantly courted by cheerleaders: “I’m always doing that—yearning for the unattainable.” He’s actually interested in Rawson; they were hiding their relationship due to small-town homophobia. Gentry participates in a fake relationship with Legend to hide his secret, but her continued infatuation makes her believe that she can somehow will him to love her. Meanwhile, Gentry starts hearing the ghost of Sylvia, who cautions her against the lie of daydreams. Soon, the living and the dead must work together to right past wrongs. Eadie (Mistaken Identity, 2013) brings several topical issues into this novel, sensitively addressing themes of sexual identity, homophobia, and suicide; regarding the latter, Sylvia is shown to be tied to her mother’s house until she resolves her own past conflict—and she sees Gentry as being on the path to a similarly heartbreaking fate. Gentry’s first-person narration is well written and rings true for a teenage girl who frequently has her head in the clouds. Aunt Tom’s Southern witticisms make her a truly standout character; her memorable one-liners include the observation that “it’s so dry the trees are bribing the dogs to whiz on them.”
A solid coming-of-age tale that gets teen turmoil right.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4809-9500-0
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
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 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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