Promise lurks inside this entertaining, wordy and densely populated mystery of unsettled spirits and family ancestry.
A mysterious death and ghostly sightings stir up a small Illinois town.
A muddied, dead body turns up at the intersection of Dell Road and the Jesse Kay Memorial Bridge in Billins, Ill., a sleepy hamlet renowned for its mysterious, unexplained occurrences. The corpse turns out to be that of Peter “Stinky Pete” Weldon, an aging, reformed town troublemaker. To most of the citizens, including the police, his death doesn’t come as a surprise since Weldon and his family had many run-ins with the law, as well as “connections to unusual and unexplained events.” The news startles local veteran police chief, William “Goots” Killen, who learns that the cause of Weldon’s demise is inconclusive except for a few defensive cuts and bruises. Word travels fast, and the death renews statewide interest in Billins, especially for Chicago-based, paranormal-obsessed, newspaper reporter (and possible mobster’s daughter) Connie Danci, who heads into town to uncover the truth. Eyewitness Janet Beverly reported seeing an apparition near the bridge where Weldon was found. Locals know this vision as the “ghost girl,” the spirit of Elizabeth Finney, a young child who had died 50 years ago on the Kay Bridge. Meanwhile, haunting dreams and strange happenings torture Weldon’s daughter, high school sophomore Jessica Lyons, who has her own personal demons to sort, thanks to a violent past and a shady family. Amid old secrets, haunted houses, unearthed bones and devil dogs, the story introduces a host of extraneous townsfolk (even in its final pages) and sheds light on Dell Road’s otherworldly hokum through chapters of lumpy prose. Though McNabb could have pruned his narrative down for clarity and character cohesiveness, the chugging plot keeps the reading lively.
Promise lurks inside this entertaining, wordy and densely populated mystery of unsettled spirits and family ancestry.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0595702701
Page Count: 373
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
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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