A great concept—why women fall for Peter Pans who never grow up—with a less than great delivery.
This time out, poet/second-novelist Fox (My Sister from the Black Lagoon, 1998) focuses on Wendy, the fifth generation of Darling women to make the flight to Neverland. The Darlings are, “like all women attracted to men who charm but don’t commit, lost girls” who find it difficult to settle down to reality. Peter, with his island, free-spirited ways, and his gift of flight, will forever haunt them as they try to find men as charming but more mature. Narrated by Wendy Darling Braverman, great granddaughter of J.M Barrie’s original Wendy, the story begins as 40-ish Wendy, living in San Francisco with husband Freeman and teenaged daughter Berry, is recovering from a breakdown. Both hurt and touched by magic, she feels that her family’s visits to Neverland—maybe illusionary—have distorted their lives. Her father, who founded an airline, was a charming man who deserted his family: aging Nana, in London, is still trying to fly, and grandmother Jane has been gone for years. Since childhood, Wendy knew about the family’s rite of passage—the appearance in adolescence of a charming boy with whom she’d fly to Neverland. Peter duly appeared, but Wendy’s visit was a disturbing mix of happy and bad memories (she may have been raped by Captain Hook) that continue to haunt her. Moving between past and the present, Wendy, a children’s storywriter, recalls her childhood and marriage as she prepares daughter Berry for Peter’s arrival. Berry, deeply troubled and conflicted, is the only Darling who can’t fly, finding it increasingly difficult to live with the Darling legend. When mother and daughter are hospitalized, the appearance of grandmother Jane, dressed as an aviatrix, helps Wendy understand herself, her family, and the hold that Peter has on them all—a gift that allows the Darling women to soar above the quotidian.
Overwrought, overwritten, unpersuasive.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-1790-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
GET IT
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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
