A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.
Three women’s lives intersect during the tumultuous 1960s.
Set in Chicago in the buildup to the 1968 Democratic National Convention and during the convention itself, Travers’ novel occasionally seems plotted at random, with characters’ lives crisscrossing by chance and important moments being disposed of in a sentence or two. Fortunately, the characters Travers has created are all compelling enough that the happenstance plotting doesn’t derail the book. The strongest character is Sophie, a woman coping with the death of her lover and a world that either looked the other way from her homosexuality or openly derided it. Sophie attracts two women on separate journeys of coping with loss and finding renewal—Rose, a homeless woman trying hard to forget the daughter she lost and unable to keep from pitching in when she sees a garden that’s grown unruly, and Zak, a young teenager from the South who’s been forced to grow up much more quickly than she might have otherwise, thanks to a mother who’s far from the parent of the year. Sophie and Rose are vividly felt women that Travers imbues with all manner of rich personality traits and mournful memories. But Zak, who bears the burden of much of the plot, occasionally feels pulled from a shelf of stock characters. Still, Travers creates such a believable bond among the three women in a short amount of time that when that bond inevitably begins to fray, it all feels believably awful. Similarly, the ending becomes poignant thanks almost entirely to the characters and not to the machinations of the plot. Travers is an expansive writer and many of the book’s early passages are filled with long sections that could easily be condensed, but there’s a very good novel in here, just waiting for some strong editorial guidance to bring it out. And if nothing else, Travers’ evocation of ’60s Chicago is terrific, creating a real sense of a city on the brink of catastrophe, where the forgotten citizens reach out to each other because no one else will bother to do so.
A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983145806
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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