A wonderfully intriguing examination of what makes, and might break, a family.
Family, fame and a perceptive youngster's idea that "We are designed for belief" all collide in this debut novel.
Luke Prescott is a precocious soon-to-be high-school senior living in Delaware with this mother and grandmother. He knows about things like "neurotransmitter protein receptors" and cross-country running, but he doesn't know his father. Sara, his mother, is a picture-perfect New Age woman. Dressing up her life with elements of Buddhism and Eastern thought, she co-owns a wellness center and teaches yoga. Nana, Sara's mother and the widow of a Christian missionary killed by South American jungle tribesmen, provides both acceptance and stability for the family. That includes Luke's two sisters, Aurora and Pearl, in college in New York as the story unfolds. Nana's family traces its lineage to the 1600s through a series of women who each had three daughters, only one of whom had children, all of whom were daughters. Luke says, "I don't think it means anything," but it has informed his introspective, intuitive and reflective personality. Into this mix comes Mark Franco, Luke's biological father, the popular star of a highly rated TV series. Mark asks to meet Luke, offspring of a one-night romance, and with Sara's agreement, Mark flies Luke to Hollywood to spend the summer. Luke sees the money-fame-glamour side of life, Sara grows jealous and the particles that make up this nuclear family become rearranged. The novel resonates with authenticity, both with its description of the world of women from which Luke emerges and the world of easy celebrity in which he is tempered. Even many of Howrey's minor characters—Luke's sisters, for example—shine, and the narrative, related in alternate segments from Luke's point of view and in the third person, will draw the reader in.
A wonderfully intriguing examination of what makes, and might break, a family.Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-37916-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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