An emotionally satisfying story of two college students finding love amid chaos.
A sequel offers an ongoing melodrama set on a university campus.
Poole’s (Don’t Let Me Fall, 2013) new novel in her Village series brings back several characters from her earlier installment, notably college sophomore Ciara Capers, a smart and emotionally brave young woman returning to Aurbor Grove University after her adventures in the first book. AGU star quarterback Xander Oliver reappears as well. A sensitive “preacher’s kid,” Xander tries not to become ensnared in the typical partying ways of college (he remembers his religious upbringing often, with its calls for “a clean head, a clean heart, and clean hands”). Ciara rooms with her best friend, Faraji, and an archly competitive young woman named Brooklyn, with whom she often clashes. Mixed into this tense combination are romantic entanglements: Ciara’s clingy ex-boyfriend Trey continues to show up on her cellphone, for instance (“It’s a never-ending saga with him,” she tells Brooklyn. “Every time he calls or texts me, I have to relive all my mistakes”). And while Faraji’s boyfriend, Nick, provides her with a steady source of emotional support, he also delivers some complications, since he and Ciara earlier had a brief fling they’ve decided to keep a secret from Faraji. In steady and well-controlled dramatic advancements, Poole shapes the events of her story to bring Ciara and Xander closer together despite the schemes of Brooklyn and the boorish antics of Xander’s squad mates. Most memorably, the author creates a richly believable atmosphere of college life—the parties, the academic pressures, the swings between tedium and debauchery, the struggles of students to forge their own identities as they move into adulthood, the emotional baggage of ex-lovers and new attachments, etc. (Poole also refreshingly works in an element of real-world, old-fashioned financial concerns, an aspect usually left out of campus fiction.) The action of the book takes place independently from its predecessor, although the two novels are best read in sequence; together, they present a warmly convincing tale of 21st-century university life.
An emotionally satisfying story of two college students finding love amid chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9910708-1-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Jack of All Trades Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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