An unforgiving story about abuse in a fractured and ruined family.
A young girl struggles through life with an alcohol-swilling mother and a violent stepfather in this debut novel.
Liz Burke, age 9, is growing up hard in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania in the 1940s. She has two brothers—one older, one younger—named Patrick and Matthew, and a dictator of a mother named Clare. Dad died years before in an accident at work, and Clare struggles to make ends meet working at the local brewery. One day, Liz and Patrick cut school to go to the river, and Patrick hits his head and drowns. Liz blames herself for the accident and now has to endure grief, problems at school, and a mother who is drinking heavily. She also needs to take care of Matthew, a sensitive boy who is just starting first grade. Unable to make rent, Clare begins to bring home gentlemen in the evenings, and Liz faces taunts at school for her mother’s descent into prostitution. Seeking a permanent mate, Clare latches on to Nick Sinclair, a veteran who has started working at the brewery. It is not long before he and Clare are brawling in the kitchen in drunken spats. Nick also physically abuses the kids and later rapes Liz. She tells no one of the crime, and the insanity at home continues. By the time Liz is 12, she is pregnant with Nick’s child, and the veteran, who fears exposure, takes her to Seattle. Clare, who had abandoned the family in disgust, is reunited with Matthew, while Liz begins anew in Washington under the impression she is in a loving relationship with Nick. Wammer’s narrative about wartime life in coal country describes the sometimes-brutal realities faced by his characters with a good deal of emotion and does well to add several kindhearted characters to the madhouse, including Liz herself and the departed dad. But parts of the story strain credulity. Too many people believe the often told lie that Liz is almost 18, and an additional sexual pairing with her and another man in Washington is unnecessary. Through a series of about-face personality changes from several characters and a tale that spans decades, the sad novel begins to feel overdone and a tad gratuitous.
An unforgiving story about abuse in a fractured and ruined family.Pub Date: March 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5333-6849-2
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 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 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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