Kept afloat by a plucky heroine, like a yuppie version of Stephanie Plum.
Debut author Boero’s auspicious beginning to a planned mystery series features a law school student with prosopagnosia.
Liz Howe suffers from a rare condition that prevents her from recognizing faces, but her other senses are highly attuned to compensate. When she discovers the body of a partner in the stairwell of the law office where she’s working as a summer associate, Liz impresses the investigating detective with her observations. Despite her prosopagnosia, Liz can detect that Detective James Paperelli is lust-worthy. While the young female amateur sleuth crushing on the unavailable detective isn’t an original plot device in the world of cozy mysteries, Boero makes it fresh by having James welcome Liz’s assistance rather than warning her away. Acting as an informant for Paperelli, Liz enlists firm partner and her boss, Janice Harrington, to help her infiltrate the firm’s inner workings. Liz, with her self-proclaimed nerdiness, diagnosed neurological condition and conventional concerns about her appearance, is a believable, sympathetic protagonist, although readers may wonder how she has time to study, research her academic articles, work part time and embark on a self-improvement program. James, on the other hand, with his designer clothing and unending kindness, is almost too good to be true, save one uncharacteristic and troubling emotional outburst. Boero offers unique, memorable settings in St. Louis, Mo., and Marshfield, Wis., the second of which greatly informs Liz’s personality (and makes Wisconsin seem like a desirable place to live). Despite a few instances where the action slows and a slightly pat resolution, Boero’s book will appeal to fans of mysteries and chick lit. While Liz emphasizes her self-identified shortcomings—seemingly de rigueur for women of this age group—her academic achievements and pursuit by four eligible males suggest otherwise. Still, her fresh voice makes up for a few clichéd aspects of the novel.
Kept afloat by a plucky heroine, like a yuppie version of Stephanie Plum.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615762524
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Nerdy Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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