A real sense of place makes this recommended read almost as much fun as the Vineyard in July.
In this engrossing mashup of chick lit, mystery and romance, Hurley (The Prodigal, 2013, etc.) conjures up experiences that provoke three beautiful young women marred by failure and disappointment to question traditional values (church and family).
Once on Martha’s Vineyard, mystical, life-altering events (as well as sexual encounters) come to the three friends in rapid succession. Sweet, 32-year-old, suicidal Charlotte Harris arrives via ferry, and she carries an urn with her daughter’s ashes. She’s ostensibly there to indulge in a reunion with her old college pals, the glamorous sexpot Turner Graham and the single, athletic and free-spirited Dory Delano (who welcomes both as guests in her elegant Edgartown home). Dory immediately asks Charlotte (who is ready to slip off and kill herself) to find Enoch, a soft-spoken man known as “the fisherman.” When she accidentally hands him her suicide note instead of Dory’s shopping list, he reads it. His advice? Swim off Gay Head where currents are strongest. While readers may suspect Charlotte’s efforts to drown herself will fail, her implausible, nearly miraculous rescue, not to mention Dory’s own subsequent experience with the miraculous, and Enoch’s unselfish, peaceful behavior create a riptide of curiosity. While not philosophically deep, the novel is addictive, escapist reading that features stock figures such as Dory’s beau, Trafalgar “Tripp” Wallace the Third, who squanders his family’s old money, and Father Tommy Vecchio, who gives priests a bad name. Some facile generalizations about Roman Catholicism weaken the story, but clever biblical parallels and metaphors that run underneath the surface add intrigue. The skippable final chapters offer a secular explanation of Enoch, which seems unnecessary to all but the most literal-minded readers. Readers may want to stop reading after the deliriously satisfying conclusion and just enjoy a peek into the lives of the filthy rich.
A real sense of place makes this recommended read almost as much fun as the Vineyard in July.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0976127574
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ragbagger Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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