An unnerving but highly readable historical novel about a troubled teen.
Rollins’ (Good-Time Girl, 2019) historical novel tells the story of a troubled, talented English boy’s coming-of-age in the 1960s.
As a small child, George Carveth grows up on the Cornish coast surrounded by family, although some of his relatives disapprove of the ballet class that he attends: “Strange he was the only male child there. Some of the boys in the neighborhood didn’t want George playing football anymore, which was batty….The adults decided this ‘Frenchy dancing’ had gone far enough.” When his father gets an offer of a new job in London, his parents move to the city while 10-year-old George is sent to a posh boarding school. There, the other students make fun of his accent, and a bigoted member of the faculty takes exception to George’s partial Indian ancestry. He’s seemingly befriended by one of his schoolmasters, Mr. Wilburn, but the man quickly reveals his true intentions by asking George to dance naked for him. The teacher’s sexual abuse of the boy coincides with a split in George’s personality: the cautious, everyday George and the secretive “Shadow George,” which he sees as his “bad self." As Shadow George increasingly makes decisions for him, the 14-year-old dances on a lark before his classmates while "lightly clad," and makes aggressive advances toward younger students. One of his uncles, who recognizes George’s talent for singing, dancing, and impressions, encourages his parents to contact a talent scout, so George meets a pair of Americans named Jack and Jill Stuart. With their encouragement—particularly that of Jill, to whom the teenager takes a special fancy—George begins to hone his craft and embark on a career in entertainment. The 15-year-old continues to struggle with his confused sexual feelings as he pines for Jill and as Jack makes sexual overtures. As the boy reaches his later teens and success in the arts appears within reach, Shadow George threatens to cause more trouble. Over the course of this novel, Rollins’ prose is nimble and ornately textured, evoking the landscapes of Cornwall and London with painterly skill. Her characters are drawn even more finely, as each is revealed to be a knotted web of conflicting instincts and beliefs. Her treatment of sexuality—and the predatory advances of adults and older children—is particularly sharp. At one point, George reveals Wilburn’s actions to his older cousin Timmy, who says that he regularly exposes himself to a Norwegian sailor in exchange for a penny. The cousin remarks that there are “Odd ducks in the world…I’ve met a few. No one ever tells you.” Apart from these moments, however, the book has a very traditional feel; indeed, Rollins lays out her story at a leisurely pace that sometimes drags, and the plot’s shape is somewhat easy to predict. Still, Rollins has assembled an array of broken people who are compelling, even as they destroy one another, and she manages to capture a horrific side of humanity.
An unnerving but highly readable historical novel about a troubled teen.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79572-477-7
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2019
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
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Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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