A tender, spirited family tale to complete a warm, earnest series.
In this conclusion to Cardillo’s (Dancing on Sunday Afternoons, 2017, etc.) dramatic trilogy, a grief-ridden widow and her teenage son search for solace at her family’s island cottage.
It’s been a year since Florence resident Elizabeth Todd Innocenti lost Antonio, her husband of 14 years, to ALS. Her sorrow’s compounded by her mother-in-law, Adriana, who never accepted her and seems to resent her for still being alive. So Elizabeth takes up her grandmother Lydia Hammond on an offer to spend the summer at Innisfree, a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, just off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Bringing along her son, Matteo, Elizabeth believes returning to her home will help them both. But she has her work cut out for her: elderly Lydia had to abandon Innisfree for a nursing home two years ago, and the cottage is now dilapidated. Elizabeth’s relationship with Matteo is also in need of repair, as his sorrow turns to anger and he sometimes lashes out at his mother. Elizabeth hopes to reignite her passion for documentary filmmaking (stunted during Antonio’s illness) and may be falling for a local, Caleb Monroe, grandson to Tobias, Innisfree’s former caretaker. But her most important decision is where she and Matteo will call home: Italy or Chappaquiddick Island. As in previous novels, Cardillo’s slowly unfolding narrative is steeped in lavish melodrama. A theme of family, for one, enriches the story: Adriana rejects Elizabeth, but the widow likewise keeps Caleb at bay, fearing his closeness could mean he’s replacing Antonio as Matteo’s father—or becoming something much more to her. The author’s fervent prose induces striking imagery brimming with emotion, like her description of isolated, battered Innisfree, which Elizabeth discerns is just as “needy” as she is. Despite the saga’s potential for utter bleakness, it’s often upbeat. Romance between Elizabeth and Caleb develops leisurely but effectively; Elizabeth reunites with beloved Izzy (Caleb’s aunt); and endlessly droll Lydia, still stuck in a nursing home, asks her granddaughter to “argue before my parole board and get me out of this joint.”
A tender, spirited family tale to complete a warm, earnest series.Pub Date: April 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942209-37-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bellastoria Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2017
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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