The discovery of a skeleton evokes memories of a 1950s summer roiled by passions, innocent and profane, and redeemed by abiding loyalties. When 49-year-old Callie Anne learns that human bones have been found on the site of the old Starlite Drive-in, she can't follow her aunt's advice to ``leave it be.'' Instead, she drives to the site, recognizes objects buried with the body, and slips one of them into her purse. She isn't being ghoulish—the object in question is an artifact of her past, taking her back to 1956 and the summer when the drifter Charlie Memphis came into her family's life. Callie Anne, an only child, lived then with her mother Teal and father Claude on the grounds of the drive-in theater Claude managed. Back then, Teal, unnerved by Claude's bullying and constant criticism, hasn't left the house for five years, and Claude himself, feeling trapped in his job and the small Indiana town they live in, dreams only of escape. And so the arrival of handsome Charlie Memphis, whom Claude takes on to help with maintenance, heats up an already tense situation. The 13-year-old Callie Anne, who watches movies nightly with Claude, decides that she's in love with Charlie, and Teal—a gentle and loving woman—is also smitten. Then Callie Anne, piecing disparate information and hearsay together with reports of stolen money, concludes that Charlie is a convicted murderer. As Claude's jealousy increases, Callie Anne's apprehensions mount, barely relieved by her first romance with teenage ticket-taker Virgil. Matters come to their inevitable head when Charlie disappears after Callie Anne has witnessed a fight between him and her father, and Teal, confronted by Claude, moves out briefly. Now, years later, Callie Anne finally discovers Charlie's fate, but Teal, who loyally came back to Claude, can't accept what those bones mean. A sweetly unpretentious tale of a defining summer that taught a young girl too much about love and life. An accomplished debut.
Pub Date: July 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15389-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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