While adding to the literature of domestic violence, this novel delivers unpleasant characters.
In this psychological thriller, a woman with an abusive, controlling boyfriend agrees to help him exact revenge on a childhood friend.
Felicity and Jay, of Coalton in Britain, have a classic co-dependent relationship. He drinks, loses his temper, and gets into fights; she tries to intervene, picks up the pieces, and makes excuses to her friends. Even uncritical Felicity is taken aback, though, when Jay asks her to become Mark Hutchington’s girlfriend so that she can make him suffer. Eleven years ago, when Jay and Mark were 16, they were best friends—until Mark slept with Jay’s girlfriend, Sammie. She later disappeared. “Everything that’s gone wrong for me is because of him,” Jay says. Chapters from Sammie’s point of view explain the events of 11 years ago and reveal early parallels to Felicity’s experience with Jay. Felicity becomes angrily defensive when a friend confronts her about Jay’s mistreatment—“I am not vulnerable and I’m no pushover”—and to somehow prove that, she agrees with the revenge plan, though she has misgivings when Mark is gentle, caring, and supportive. (Sammie’s experience, however, suggests another side to him.) Jay’s control-freak abuse quickly escalates, and Felicity becomes his prisoner. But reaching out to Mark uncovers a terrible and dangerous secret. Chapman (Too Good for this World, 2015, etc.) writes a concise, quick-paced, and dramatic woman-in-jeopardy story. She demonstrates a superb understanding of how women wind up with charming con artists who turn abusive; Sammie, for example, gets little love or attention from her parents, who are divorcing after her brother’s death. Felicity, too, experienced a family tragedy that left her with her guard down. But it’s a tough read when not a single character is sympathetic, kind, thoughtful, or self-aware; they instead range from maddening to loathsome. The pathologies of domestic violence presented here are well-known from fictional and nonfictional sources, making some things predictable, such as Jay’s increasing violence and control and Felicity’s denial that it’s happening. The surprising elements, meanwhile, feel garish and exploitative.
While adding to the literature of domestic violence, this novel delivers unpleasant characters.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5197-3867-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
