Pedersen is not at her best in this dull chronicle of family life.
Third installment in the Hallie Palmer series (Heart’s Desire, 2005, etc.) offers more somber subject matter: the death of a parent.
Nearly 19 and studying graphic design at the Cleveland Art Institute, Hallie is summoned from a fraternity party (in this world, art students apparently hang out with jocks and frat boys) by news that her 39-year-old father has suffered a fatal heart attack and her mother is in shock and sedated. Returning home to her nine siblings, Hallie soon realizes that she’ll be bearing the brunt of child-care duties. Older brother Eric must return to college or he’ll lose his scholarship, younger sister Louise has run away to live with her boyfriend at M.I.T., and Mom has been moved to a psychiatric hospital. So Hallie drops out of school and begins as best as she can to raise seven kids on the Palmers’s scant savings. Old friends lend a hand: Bernard Stockton and his boyfriend Gil offer the occasional gourmet meal and showtune-inspired pep talk; old poker buddies Officer Rich and bookie Cappy keep a watchful eye; and Uncle Lenny, a salty sailor the children adore, puts order and laughter back into the grieving household. Finally, Pastor Costello takes over and gives Hallie a much-needed break to work on her deteriorating love life. The two previous books were set among the Stocktons, rich eccentrics with whom Hallie stayed while sorting out her home life. Relegating this wacky clan to the background while Hallie’s large family takes center stage works to this story’s disadvantage. The author devotes many pages to describing the utter chaos created by a large family, but fails to provide the amusing details and memorable characters that would keep all those chores from becoming a chore to read about.
Pedersen is not at her best in this dull chronicle of family life.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-47956-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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