Kennedy’s (See Mommy Run, 2012) coming-of-age story follows Brooke, a teenage girl struggling to divide her life among her friends, her family, her love interests and an unexpected controlling force.
When both car and cellphone break down, leaving Brooke stranded in a tropical storm, she seeks shelter in what she believes is the house of her mom’s friend. Instead, she’s invited into the home of frail and flamboyant Laura de France, a dizzyingly complex character who is never fully fleshed out. Dialogue flows naturally between the pair; in fact, realistic conversations become the book’s highlight. Claiming to be a 1950s actress who worked alongside the best in the business, Miss de France offers Brooke the opportunity to wear one of Elizabeth Taylor’s dresses to a Valentine’s Day ball. Brooke spends the next eight chapters obsessing over the dress in most of her internal thoughts, though her yearning for the garment is never cultivated into a believable motivation; she “wanted to look really hot for [her boyfriend, Tyler] at Paige’s party [and] to get even with Paige,” the girl with whom her boyfriend had cheated on her. Undercut by such flimsy decisions, Brooke doesn’t grow much, making her somewhat difficult to sympathize with. At the party, one of Brooke’s friends, a film enthusiast, exposes Miss de France as a fraud—she’s not a real actress; the stress from the accusation causes Miss de France to suffer a heart attack. Consumed by guilt from her friend’s accusation, Brooke succumbs to Miss de France’s delicate condition and allows herself to become Miss de France’s “slave.” As Miss de France dominates the girl’s life, Brooke’s world begins to spin out of control: Miss de France has a sudden, fantastical ambition for Brooke to be a movie star; her friends are exasperated with being neglected; and she has a host of new romantic interests. With multiple engaging plot twists, the basics of a strong story are here, but the rather flat main characters merely react to events instead of using their evolving personalities.
More character depth would help fill out this story about a young woman finding herself.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1612357966
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Melange Books
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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