Strong, deftly intertwined narratives make this family tale a winner despite minor imperfections.
An abandoned daughter searches for the truth about her birthparents in this novel.
The story opens in 1921 in San Diego, California, with the striking Guinevere “Gwen” Dierks walking through the working-class neighborhood of Ocean Beach with her 5-year-old daughter, Mary Jane. Holding back the tears, Gwen takes Mary Jane to the home of Edith and Gilbert Beeler, telling her that she must stay with this family for a while. After Gwen leaves, the distraught Mary Jane is told by Edith: “I am your new mother….You don’t have that other family any longer.” Mary Jane’s upbringing with the Beelers is a difficult one. Dad Beeler is a kind man, whereas the tyrannical Mother Beeler punishes Mary Jane at every opportunity—on one occasion, cruelly holding the child’s soaking wet panties in her face for not making it to the bathroom in time. At 9, Mary Jane is informed by Mother Beeler that her birth mom has died. Growing older, Mary Jane develops an intense desire to understand why she was given away and, despite Mother Beeler’s attempts to impede her, discovers that her father was a high-ranking naval officer. As Mary Jane’s search intensifies, Gwen’s own motivations for leaving her daughter become clearer. Based on a true story about the author’s family and illustrated with photographs from various sources throughout, the intricate narrative flips between Gwen’s past, detailing her troubled romance with a married commander, and Mary Jane’s journey into womanhood. The details of Gwen’s life leading up to her separation from her daughter are revealed incrementally, making for a tantalizing read. Evans (String of Pearls, 2012) is an observant writer, although her descriptive passages can appear stiff and laconic: “The interior” of the Beelers’ home “perpetually smelled of furniture polish and cleaning fluids. The furnishings were formal and of good quality.” These portions would benefit from further embellishment. But this is compensated for by an intriguing plotline and realistically stinging dialogue—at one point, Mother Beeler asks Mary Jane: “Why ever would you want to try to find your family? You come from trash and you’ll go back to trash.” Readers will root for Gwen and Mary Jane as they navigate a cruel and deceitful world in search of a sense of belonging.
Strong, deftly intertwined narratives make this family tale a winner despite minor imperfections.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-977202-03-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2019
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 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
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