by Maud Carol Markson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2009
Mostly irritating and entirely unnecessary.
A coming-of-age tale from the author of When We Get Home (1989).
Pigeon is the youngest of three children. The rest of her family consists of older sister Dove, older brother Robin, their distant and eccentric mother and a loving but often-absent father. When Pigeon is five, it becomes apparent that her father, a pharmacist, has been engaged in some less-than-legal sales activities. This revelation adds another layer of anxiety to an already tense home life, and while the father’s ultimate disappearance doesn’t exactly fix things, it does spur his wife into action. In the middle of the night, she instructs her children to pack their things, and she takes them from their apartment in Manhattan to her brother’s seaside cottage in New Jersey. There, they all begin a new life. Significant events occur. Discoveries are made. Innocence is lost. Wisdom is gained. This novel distinguishes itself from a multitude of similar works largely by its shortcomings. The dialogue is ludicrously unconvincing, composed mostly of clichés and outlandish pronouncements. Pigeon might be comforted when her uncle folds her in an embrace and assures her that “Nothing can’t be fixed or cured,” but readers are likely to be distracted by this statement’s demonstrable falseness. And the author seems to invite her audience to quibble about the ubiquity of the family Columbidae—or simply to guffaw—when she writes, “No, Dove may have been beautiful and she may have been a particularly rebellious teenager, but despite her name, she was never a rare bird.” Markson begins with a foreword written in the adult voice of her young narrator, explaining that the book is an attempt to work through that eventful summer long ago. Indeed, the novel reads very much like thinly disguised memoir, and it’s difficult to imagine any non-therapeutic reason for its existence.
Mostly irritating and entirely unnecessary.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-187-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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