A courageous story about a brave heroine.
A girl learns to rise above a traumatic past in this debut fictionalized autobiography.
Young Mary Ellen seems like a typical girl living an ordinary life in 1950s Rhode Island. She loves her parents, her Italian grandparents, and her little brother, Ray. She enjoys listening to fairy tales, playing outside, and learning about her Italian heritage. Her parents seem to have a good marriage, and her family is fairly well-off. But that’s just the outer facade. In reality, Mary Ellen’s life is terribly broken. Her father does things to her that she doesn’t understand every time they’re alone, and she doesn’t feel that she can tell anyone about it, even though she can see that her dad’s behavior is tearing her family apart. As she grows older and the abuse gets worse, she finally finds the courage to tell her father “no”—but she still has to deal with her family’s profound struggles and the lingering guilt and shame that resulted from her childhood ordeal. Despite all that, she strives to rise above her past, form new relationships, and build a new life for herself. Sinclair’s writing is solid, with detailed descriptions of Mary Ellen’s surroundings, like the following description of her grandfather: “Everything about him is neat; his pants and shirt are pressed, and the top of his head is shiny, with a circle of wispy white hair left around it. He has bushy white eyebrows and black eyes. People call him Mr. Clean because he looks like the man on the label of the detergent that my mother washes floors with.” Such scenes hammer home the normalcy of her life, contrasting horribly with the (thankfully not graphic) scenes showing her “secret.” She describes her mental struggles mostly in a child’s vocabulary, which makes them all the more effective. Occasionally the dialogue feels a little more forced, with characters spelling out their feelings in situations where most real people would try to keep them hidden. The narrative also drags at times, but for the most part, this is a well-written, moving tale of overcoming hardship.
A courageous story about a brave heroine.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0117-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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