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
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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