by Lynda Chervil ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2014
Readers looking for a heroine with brains and beauty will enjoy following Gabrielle’s appealing journey.
A compelling mystery/adventure about past lives and cutting-edge technology, set on the coast of Maine.
Gabrielle’s life has plateaued: Her marriage is merely functional, and her career at a venture capital firm is at a standstill, with no promotion in sight. When her boss sends her to Castine, Maine, to see his stepdaughter Reagan’s invention, she believes it will be a quick trip. Then Gabrielle meets Fiona, an eccentric woman who startles her with a disturbing tarot card reading. Shaken, she goes to see Reagan’s new type of battery, and after watching it fail, she meets Alexander, a handsome man who feels drawn to her energy. They make plans for lunch the next day, and after Gabrielle settles in at a bed-and-breakfast, she dreams of Jullian VanDee, a woman who died in Castine while waiting for her lover to come home. When Fiona suggests that Gabrielle may be carrying around past lives with unfinished business, her connection to Jullian begins to haunt her. Lunch with Alexander confirms their mysterious, magnetic attraction, and, later, car trouble keeps Gabrielle in Castine. Reagan calls Gabrielle to try to convince her that the powerful battery works, and soon the two women begin to wonder if there’s foul play keeping the invention from the world. The question of Gabrielle’s past lives becomes a subplot as she delves into the mystery of who’s been tampering with Reagan’s invention. However, her dreams of Jullian VanDee grow stronger, as does her attraction to Alexander, despite the secrets she learns about him. It’s deeply refreshing to read about two smart women plotting and scheming about science instead of romance, and the story’s conclusion delivers on this empowering premise. Some readers may dislike the technical language regarding Reagan’s invention (“The fluid…didn’t have the stabilizing additives I developed. Without them, the materials I use in the anodes become too volatile”), but it adds authenticity to the story, even if a few convenient plot twists may raise eyebrows. Gabrielle and Alexander’s deep connection is unfortunately two-dimensional, as is Gabrielle’s perfunctory marriage, and although the supernatural element of the story is intriguing, it never reaches its full potential. That said, this is a smart adventure with strong messages about altruism, big dreams and the influence of fate.
Readers looking for a heroine with brains and beauty will enjoy following Gabrielle’s appealing journey.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494462864
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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