Doesn’t pack the fireworks, but that’s not where the story lives—it’s in the day-to-day lives of its well-drawn characters...
Collison’s coming-of-age novel follows three teenagers who leave their homes to try to find themselves and escape less-than-perfect circumstances.
Ramie Redfeather lives with his mother and little brother and longs to find his father, known as Redfeather, a musician who never made it big, though locals recognize him. Trying to catch up with him at a gig in Denver, Ramie hitchhikes from his hometown of Cheyenne, Wyo., and meets Chas Sweeney, a kid from nearby Baltimore whose mother is on life support. In denial about his dysfunctional family back home, Chas stole his grandmother’s Cadillac to drive across the country. In Denver, they meet up with LaRoux, formerly Faith Appleby, who has run away from her strict religious household to perform in a music contest in Austin. All three characters are well-drawn, and though the circumstances that draw them together seem a bit forced, their relationship feels real. They’re three lost kids, geographically and spiritually, yet they’re specific and recognizable types. Ramie is strong, loyal and keeps to himself. Chas is smart and a bit irritating but boundlessly enthusiastic, and despite his confusion about what to do with his life, he has a good heart. LaRoux is beautiful and talented but flighty. Much to the author’s credit, all of them are believably flawed. At times, though, the narrative gets muddled when the three kids’ stories drift into navel-gazing and away from the plot, but Collison’s prose is nonetheless clean and efficient. The resolutions of Ramie’s and LaRoux’s quests are fairly predictable but still well-laid, though Chas’s story turns out to be the more intriguing one, especially in the end.
Doesn’t pack the fireworks, but that’s not where the story lives—it’s in the day-to-day lives of its well-drawn characters and their crises.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989365307
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Fiction House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
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
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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