A promising series debut that will make readers eagerly await the next volume.
Russell (November in New Orleans, 2018) offers a fantasy mystery in which a woman discovers that you can go home again—if you’re willing to travel through time.
Mariah Garrett is in a bit of a rut. Four years after being shot by a college classmate, she’s become an agoraphobe, unable to leave Gull Cottage, her family’s vacation home in Surfside Beach, Texas. She also struggles with panic attacks, which she personifies as “the Caveman.” One day, Mariah finds a way out of her routine after she removes a wood panel in her attic, revealing a previously unknown set of stairs. She descends the staircase and ends up in the kitchen of her great-grandmother Mama Foss and great-grandfather Poppa B—in 1957. Back in the present, a mummified body, estimated to have died in the ’50s, is unearthed at the town pier. Mariah decides to solve the present-day mystery by investigating it in the past. However, her impulsive, present-day best friend, Phoebe Gilliam, steals the corpse’s head, hoping for a cash windfall from the National Enquirer. Then the body itself disappears, and Phoebe stashes the head in Mariah’s pantry. Mariah finds herself drawn to the simpler times of the Sputnik era, and especially a handsome fellow named James Dean (no relation to the actor); they soon develop a mutual attraction. Time literally flies in this fast-paced first volume of a planned series. Along the way, Russell crafts a clever blend of whodunit and social commentary. Mariah is a likable lead who’s smart and sassy, able to think quickly on her feet. The secondary cast members of both eras are similarly engaging—the teen version of Mariah’s savvy Great Aunt Mae, a wise young skateboarder named Paul Henle, and Shirley Raft, Mae’s oddball best friend. Readers may think that Mariah should stand out more in the ’50s, but thanks to her knowledge of history (and her use of present-day Google), she makes minimal slips—other than trying to pass her cellphone off as a compact.
A promising series debut that will make readers eagerly await the next volume.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-980611-85-1
Page Count: 235
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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