A haunting reminder about the loss of innocence.
In Skomal’s (Bluff, 2012, etc.) YA novel, a group of children in a small Midwestern town learns about the harsh realities of life after the Korean War.
The children of Sand Flats, Neb., may be off from school for the summer, but they’re definitely not on vacation. It’s 1954, and Hap, Patsy, Beah and Raz meet amid the fallout of the Korean War, which has ravaged their lives. Hap, who looks “like a wax museum statue of Peter Pan,” is as lost and motherless as the boy who wouldn’t grow up. He’s abused by his father and tries to build his own, better world. Hotheaded Patsy just moved to town (after being suspended from her last school for fighting) and must learn to deal with her brother’s serious injury, which he sustained during the war and has sent him to the VA hospital. She also must come to terms with her brother’s secrets, which threaten the family’s stability. Then there are Beah, who lives in the shadow of her deceased older brother, and Raz, who is Jewish and has an “innate beauty” that sets her apart from the others. This coming-of-age story follows the group’s members, who meet for the first time that fateful summer and contend with murder, lies from their parents, lies to their parents, missing limbs, homosexuality, theft and abuse. Together, they learn the importance of friendship, truth and honesty, and they also learn that life is rarely easy. It’s a dark story about a dark world, but Skomal makes the story readable and lovely via her prose. Sand Flats—a deep-rooted cattle-farming community 20 miles from Omaha that “came to life thanks to the Union Pacific Railroad’s western push to develop the rail clear to California in the late 1800s”—itself becomes a main character. By placing this group of children, their parents and other townspeople in this distinct geographic location, Skomal has created a world that couldn’t take place anywhere else.
A haunting reminder about the loss of innocence.Pub Date: March 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478192497
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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