A sweet story of strength and second chances.
A woman seeks to put her troubled childhood behind her in Barrett’s debut novel.
Elizabeth Parker Morgan is born into a family of great privilege and great sorrow. Her mother, unable to overcome her own childhood traumas, has become an ill, unstable recluse; her father is an often absent, cruel man who inherits the unwanted burden of a successful family business. Elizabeth escapes to boarding school, college, and, ultimately, a life abroad in France. In the beauty and light of Lyon, she lives out her own fairy tale. Her job is challenging but fulfilling, and she soon becomes indispensable to her company. Thanks to her employer and benefactor, she settles into a beautiful, furnished apartment of her own. As is the case in all fairy tales, Elizabeth falls head over heels for a handsome man, yet she also discovers that the path of true love isn’t easy. Antonio Ponti has a dark past, and his old ties to gamblers haunt his personal and professional lives. The lovers are torn apart by a threat of violence, and Elizabeth flees back to the United States, brokenhearted and pregnant. However, she’s buoyed by the love of her friends and her brother and determined to make a good life for her child. Despite the shadows that surround her, Elizabeth learns the value of unconditional love and finds herself questioning whether a future with Antonio is still possible. Barrett’s novel is a light but worthwhile read. She’s a highly descriptive writer who paints lovely pictures of cobblestone streets, sun-dazzled plazas, and intimate cafes. Although her narrative of star-crossed lovers isn’t unique, it does have an unusual twist: in a pleasant departure from the traditional fairy-tale trajectory, Barrett’s heroine relies on her own determination and creates her own successes rather than waiting to be rescued by a man. It’s a welcome contrast to the sexist, demeaning attitudes that defined Elizabeth’s childhood and a satisfying victory for a protagonist who broke a cycle of abuse and unhappiness.
A sweet story of strength and second chances.Pub Date: July 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4636-0461-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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