A novel that fans of baseball fiction and coming-of-age stories will find worth a read.
A small Midwestern city provides the setting for Panno’s (Shocks & Bar-B-Q, 2011, etc.) novel about baseball and family.
Michael Carmello is 11 years old in the winter of 1958, and small for his age. In the room he shares with his older brother, Frank, he’s developed an elaborate game involving baseball cards and bottle caps, which allows him to live out his fantasies of someday pitching in the World Series. It also helps him work out the frustrations of his daily life, including bullies, a father and brother who are constantly at odds, sisters who baffle him, and a baby brother who clings to life in the hospital. Much of the book’s first half is dedicated to developing this mise-en-scene, and it’s sprinkled with the sort of vignettes that are the war stories of boyhood, about swiping things from the local convenience store, a big fire downtown, or a well-placed snowball. There are also descriptive passages, reminiscent of Richard Russo’s work, which evoke the chilly endlessness of winter by the Great Lakes. Sometimes these moments are evocative, but sometimes they’re a bit strained: “I could hear the scratch of squirrels’ feet digging into the bark of the trees as they scurried along, seemingly without order or purpose, their jerky movements like actors in a silent film.” Eventually, Michael develops a friendship with a man named Cornelius (“Neely”), a terminal patient at the hospital where his mother works. Neely, it turns out, once pitched in the Negro leagues, and Michael finds that he has much to learn from him—not only about baseball, but also about life. The first part of the book reads very much like a memoir, its stories connected mostly by the fact that they share the same protagonist; the second half reads more like fiction, with Michael’s narratives set in sharp relief to Neely’s history. Overall, the author writes competently, if not transcendently. However, the book does deal gracefully with issues of race and faith, and it reveals how Michael’s young mind parses them as basic issues of fairness while still grasping some of their complexity. Panno also shows how Michael and Neely both deserve the chance to dream, to improve, and to prove themselves on the mound.
A novel that fans of baseball fiction and coming-of-age stories will find worth a read.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0967785929
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Primordial Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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