Stories of exciting escapades whose protagonists fall flat.
In this debut collection, Canadian women and girls experience the world—from Quebec to New York City to Arizona to Guatemala and beyond—and get a little wiser for it.
There’s the protagonist of “Waiting for the Cyclone” who rides the famous Coney Island roller coaster with the lover she’s soon to leave. In “Malad,” a family with an addict mother moves south, into the home of an addict aunt. A woman wakes up with a man who is not her husband while on vacation and attempts to piece together the previous night in “Libertad,” so named for the tattoo on her one-night stand’s torso. In “Proverbs,” a student attempts to escape her cheating boyfriend and memories of rape by working on an organic farm far from both. The subjects of “Conflict Zone” navigate dark feelings when a flight to Turkey is cancelled on Christmas Eve. Returning to Mexico for the story “One Last Time,” a woman journeys to mourn for a woman she’s never met and finds a whirlwind romance with another. In “Monterrico,” exes travel to South America together when one is forced to prove she is not a “spoilsport.” When she takes an old friend to the dentist, in “Gone to Seed,” a woman is confronted with the life she could have had, had she not rejected a romantic proposition years earlier. These are sisters in transition. Dean attempts to give examples of audacious women who deviate from their expected responsibility of kindness and inherent goodness. While her intention is noble, the outcome is unrefined. Deserving neither of admiration nor sympathy, these women are unformed. The issue is not their likability (or unlikability as the case may be) but their indistinction: each is so similarly confused and thwarted that even when the stories differ, the protagonists blur together, giving the impression that this is just one story of one girl—the author, perhaps?—in variously unsatisfying scenes or stages of life.
Stories of exciting escapades whose protagonists fall flat.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-927366-50-9
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Brindle & Glass
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
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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