A portrait of victimhood, almost a glorification, in which the victim is so self-pitying and self-justifying that she loses...
Wells’s debut is the first-person account of a young woman during the Truman era who passively bears physical deformity, poverty, and spousal abuse of increasing violence until ideals and maternal instinct force her into rebellion.
Born with a club foot on a Virginia sharecropper’s farm, Cora Mae Slaughter reaches adolescence feeling like an outcast. Cora describes her father as a drunk who beats his wife and children, her mother as a shell of a woman weakened by childbirth who lives by the Bible. Only Cora’s beautiful sister Sibby, who protects Cora from the mean-spirited teasing of their schoolmates, is described with any affection. As she is quick to point out, Cora is smarter than her peers, but she pines for the kind of romance other girls her age are experiencing. As a result, when an itinerant worker named Aaron flirts with her during tobacco-curing season, she assumes they are in love. After Aaron rapes her, she inexplicably chooses to stay the night with him. Too ashamed then to return home, she wanders the countryside with him as he loses job after job to drink. He also begins to beat Cora. The birth of a child, Joshua, brightens her life, but Aaron’s viciousness increases. Eventually he puts wax in her ears to deafen her and forbids her to speak. She accepts even this new cruelty, believing she thus protects Joshua. Cora’s only friend is Nita, a black woman she meets at the creek where she and Joshua bathe. Finally, upon discovering that Aaron plans to wax up Joshua’s ears too and that he and his friends plan to set fire to the black community where Nita lives, Cora springs into action. Her revenge will be violent and complete.
A portrait of victimhood, almost a glorification, in which the victim is so self-pitying and self-justifying that she loses sympathy, and interest, early on.Pub Date: May 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52693-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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