A measured, riveting tale, written in a confident, impassioned voice.
A Massachusetts teenager of mixed heritage leaves his family behind to search for his own identity in 1960s America in Cardillo’s (The Smallest Christmas Tree, 2015, etc.) historical-drama sequel.
The Monroes revel in their quiet life in Cape Poge on Chappaquiddick Island. But tragedy rears its ugly head in 1955 when polio attacks the family’s youngest child, 7-year-old Izzy. Mother Mae takes time away from her Boat House Café, which she’d established on her own in the series’ first book, to care for her ailing daughter. Son Josiah, meanwhile, struggles to connect to his Wampanoag roots. Despite the fact that his father, Tobias, is the tribe’s sachem (chief), some tribespeople feel that Jo that doesn’t belong because his mother is Irish. Meanwhile, Mae’s engaging, selfless friend, Betty, acts as a surrogate mother for the confused, adolescent Jo. (One can only hope that she will lead a spinoff book series.) Izzy survives polio with a paralyzed left leg, necessitating braces and crutches; later, Hurricane Donna damages the café so extensively that the family may not be able to afford repairs. Selling Mae’s land, Innisfree, however, could mean that the family would be able to pay for experimental corrective surgery for Izzy, which could allow her to walk unaided. Jo feels that losing Innisfree would be like losing another part of himself. He absconds to Boston and eventually tracks down Patrick, one of Mae’s estranged siblings. It turns out that mother and son are more alike than they’re willing to admit. This unhurried novel tackles crucial issues with panache. The theme of finding one’s identity, for example, also applies to Izzy, who doesn’t want to be defined by her disease. The novel also presents racism with subtlety, as when people guess where Jo’s from based solely on the color of his skin. Over the course of the story, Cardillo skillfully weaves in events from real-life history, as when Jo later serves as a combat medic in Vietnam. The novel only falters when it shifts its perspective to Tobias, whose relatively harmless act earns him unjust ire from Mae and Izzy; this thread lacks the dramatic punch of the rest of the narrative.
A measured, riveting tale, written in a confident, impassioned voice.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942209-23-2
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Bellastoria Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
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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