Though presented as a mystery, this vivid tale employs mysticism, Catholicism, and murder to tell the story of a shining...
Haunted by dreams of a possible past life, a recovering alcoholic attempts to find her best friend’s killer in this debut novel.
Cassandra “Cass” DiSpirito and Gabriella “Kit” Labastiani have always been fun-loving North Shore girls, raised just outside of Boston and usually found at their favorite coastal bar, The Outrigger—which they, not always so affectionately, call “The Frig.” Cass’ life tragically ends there, as she is discovered beaten and strangled on The Frig’s roof, and Kit, using her skills as a journalist, vows to find her killer. Kit spends her days investigating her friend’s untimely demise, while her nights are filled with strange dreams of Germany in the 1600s, about a charitable country healer named Anke and her persecution by the church as a witch. Counter to Kit’s Roman Catholic upbringing and urged on by her grief, she comes to believe these dreams are the manifestations of past lives, the figures in them earlier incarnations of friends and family, their modern actions—and Cass’ murder—a karmic continuation of events long ago. Through them, Kit sobers up and comes to some level of acceptance and understanding about Cass’ death, even when faced with her killer. Campbell’s book builds on the culture of one of America’s oldest cities, the characters so wonderfully Bostonian that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the metropolis should find them instantly recognizable. The portrayal of Kit’s family, half-Italian, half-Irish, plays with the idiosyncrasies of both heritages with a decidedly un–PC and self-effacing sense of humor. Much of the book explores Kit and Cass’ friendship, beginning in the 1950s and ’60s, traveling with them throughout their years of terrorizing nuns in parochial school to eventually graduating to barhopping and burning gas from Boston to Ipswich. The girls come to life on the page, Kit slightly more well-behaved and intuitive, Cass more capricious and fashion-conscious, each smile-inducing detail of their love further driving home the tragedy of Cass’ death. Kit’s dreams, whether a former life or just a means to cope with her loss, further expand upon the novel’s themes of how vibrant and powerful women are viewed, the unjust and violent retribution they often draw, as well as the shortcomings of the church.
Though presented as a mystery, this vivid tale employs mysticism, Catholicism, and murder to tell the story of a shining friendship.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7414-9949-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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 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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