by Micaela Gilchrist ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2001
A cast of thousands moves sluggishly through an interminable plot. The turgid prose doesn’t help.
Sprawling frontier saga of love, loss, and revenge spanning several decades: a first from Colorado lawyer Gilchrist.
Spirited 22-year-old Mary Bullitt of Louisville, Kentucky, has tried her parents’ patience long enough. Her oh-so-refined mother is determined to marry her off without further delay, even though the likeliest candidate, General Henry Atkinson, is 44. The General has distinguished himself in campaigns against the British and the Indians; perhaps he will also be able to tame Mary. She, a headstrong hoyden, thinks he’s too old but is nonetheless intrigued by his dramatic tales of life on the edge of civilization, “where the most reckless desires of men were manifest.” This turns out to be Missouri, for the most part. On her way to St. Louis, the new Mrs. Atkinson demonstrates her pluck by coping with coarse types of every description, including a passel of backwoods brats who just for fun slowly break the neck of a trussed goose. The General is often away, fighting complicated battles with one tribe or another, and Mary fears for her own life when his nemesis, Black Hawk, appears. The General is too soft where Indians are concerned, people whisper, and no one understands why. Mary is perplexed by her husband’s evident attachment to an Indian woman known as Bright Sun, whose connection to Black Hawk troubles her. The General, however, offers no explanation. Years pass, relatives come and go between Kentucky and Missouri, the Atkinsons’ two children die of cholera, and Mary’s youthful beauty and vigor fade away. Here and there, other points of view take over: we hear from Mary’s cousin, Lieutenant Philip Cooke; the General’s diary is quoted at length; and even Bright Sun gets to tell her side of the story. But all lives revolve around the compelling persona of the old man, whose one great sin will at last be revealed.
A cast of thousands moves sluggishly through an interminable plot. The turgid prose doesn’t help.Pub Date: July 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87143-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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 Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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