A simple, often engaging tale that unravels in the final third when the author abandons Georgia for Baghdad and never gets...
A story set in rural Georgia before World War II that introduces readers to an odd group of characters brought together by a woman ahead of her time.
Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother, 2004, etc.) sets the stage for likable narrator Gladys Cailiff, a smart, witty and incisive 11-year-old who lives in the tiny town of Threestep, Ga. Gladys’ story begins with the arrival of Miss Grace Spivey, the town’s new schoolteacher, a diminutive redhead with a taste for adventure and a propensity for stirring up trouble. As it turns out, Miss Spivey spent some time in Baghdad and decides to duplicate its streets in Threestep after reading parts of The Arabian Nights to her enraptured students. She also very loosely adapts some of those stories into a play that, along with turkey shoots and dunking booths, they hope will draw visitors from miles around to Threestep. But Miss Spivey doesn’t do anything the easy way. She riles up the local school superintendent with her persistence in teaching the “colored” children who are not allowed decent textbooks. Theo Boykin, the Cailiffs’ young neighbor and a budding genius, is the main object of Miss Spivey’s efforts to give the area’s black community a crack at equality, but her efforts—much admired by the Cailiff family—always seem to go askew. When she brings in a camel herder and his camels for the big night, all of Miss Spivey’s past indiscretions seem destined to catch up with her. Young Gladys is a great narrator, but when May, her perennially pregnant older sister, takes over, the book veers into a mind-numbing story within a story within a story within a story that makes the reader long for Gladys to boot all of those other storytellers and retake the helm.
A simple, often engaging tale that unravels in the final third when the author abandons Georgia for Baghdad and never gets back on track.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06310-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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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