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THE CIVIL WARS OF JONAH MORAN

A young woman fights to defend her disabled brother against charges of arson—and finds the past intruding in bittersweet ways as her first love comes back into her life and she learns the truth about her long-dead father. This time out, the Washington-based Reynolds (The Starlite Drive-in, 1997) sets her story in a logging town on the Olympic Peninsula. Not only about love, romance, and family, the narrative also sympathetically examines the uneasy relations between the local whites and the Native Americans of a nearby reservation. Jessica Moran, now in her mid-30s, has returned home after leaving as a teenager to live in California. She’s not ready to forgive her mother, Lila, the local mill-owner, for her father’s death 19 years ago. She does want, however, to help her younger brother, Jonah, who has always had a condition similar to autism. Although Jonah doesn—t relate well to people, he’s an expert on the Civil War, whose battles he endlessly reenacts with miniature soldiers. When a suspicious fire kills three out of four paroled sex offenders living in a halfway house, the townspeople are not unhappy, but, worse, Jonah is suspect number one. The evidence? A model soldier found on the premises. Callum Luke, a Native American lawyer now working for the government, arrives to investigate. In addition, he’s Jessica’s first love and the father of the daughter she gave up for adoption in California—at her mother’s insistence. As Jessica fights to protect Jonah, she’s harassed by the fire’s lone survivor, a molester. Plus, she clashes with Callum; they later make love, only to quarrel again, when she reveals the daughter’s existence. Eventually the facts about the fire and her father’s drowning bring vindications and reconciliations—and with Callum ready to forgive, Jessica wins some civil wars of her own. Well-done characters in an unevenly paced tale that takes its time but still delivers.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-15975-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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