A fast-paced tale with creepy and slightly sleazy elements.
A novella about a lustful, wayward young man who finds a cursed rabbit’s foot.
Aeron McCloud is a charismatic orphan who’s looking forward to his upcoming 17th birthday party. His girlfriend, Jade, is the new girl at school who draws the attention of every man she passes. Bucky, Aeron’s best friend, is a nerdy, levelheaded boy who balances out Aeron’s brash machismo. One day, while preparing to go hunting with Bucky, Aeron finds a dirty, old rabbit’s foot that belonged to his grandfather. The foot proves to be a peculiar version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ring of power; Aeron obsessively carries it with him, and everyone who sees it is drawn to it. He soon realizes that the foot grants his wishes, brings him good luck, and gives him an unrelenting virility. Every woman Aeron encounters is inexorably attracted to the rabbit’s foot that he carries in his pocket, including Jade, who won’t sleep with him, despite his pleas. But as he begins to rely on the foot’s power too heavily, he realizes that it exerts a profound influence over him, and that he may be involved in something more dangerous than he first supposed. The novel gradually evolves into a warning against Aeron’s lecherous impulses. McHargue (Hunt for Red Meat: Love Stories, 2017, etc.) returns with an unusual tale of adolescent hormones run amok. At less than 100 pages, the book moves briskly, packed with plot and limited to a small cast of characters. The author writes from a second-person perspective (“It’s not your fault you were born with good looks on a bad day”)—a bold choice that makes the narrative more engaging, but one that may alienate some readers. Aeron is a supremely unlikable character (by design), and it’s rarely enjoyable to experience the story from his perspective, especially as he spends most of it in a state of arousal, cooking up immature sexual fantasies. Still, readers who enjoy tales that blend the spooky and the scandalous may find something worthwhile in this quick, easy novel.
A fast-paced tale with creepy and slightly sleazy elements.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969711-7-1
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Alpha Peak LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2017
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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