A tender family tribute that adds domestic context to the usual Spanish flu narrative.
When her fiance is drafted to serve in World War I, a young woman accepts a teaching position in Michigan, where she winds up fighting a different enemy on the homefront.
Stone’s debut novel is both a fictional memoir and a biography, written to honor his grandmother Lucile Ball and the love she shared with Howard Bridgman, a mutual devotion that sustained them during the war. Born and raised on a farm outside Albion, Michigan, Lucile met Howard in 1915, when both were attending Albion College. By 1918, they were engaged, but had to put their plans on hold when Howard was drafted into the Army. While he was away, Lucile, together with her best friend, Vera Smith, accepted an offer from a Munising, Michigan, school to fill the teaching vacancies created by the draft. Lucile and Howard wrote to each other faithfully. The novel opens at summer’s end in 1918, with Lucile and Vera on their long train journey to Munising. They are housed in the town’s nicest hotel, and although Lucile worries about Howard constantly, she is invigorated by her first experience away from home—until October, when the global Spanish flu pandemic, which was devastating the troops in Europe, reaches Munising. Within days, the schools are closed, an emergency secondary hospital is opened, and Lucile and Vera become substitute nurses. Lucile is the primary narrator of Stone’s tale. Howard’s story is interspersed through insertion of his actual letters, discovered decades later by Lucile’s family. Well-crafted, graphic prose conveys the virulence of the swift-moving epidemic. Lucile describes one stricken woman: “Her skin was severely mottled, covered in a rash of deep purple blotches. Her lips were dry and cracked and had a blue cast to them, her eyelids too.” But a persistent misuse of the first-person singular pronoun becomes irksome (for example, “The Dotys dropped Vera and I off at the inn”). While Howard’s letters add context to the love story, the narrative is most compelling in its depiction of a terrified homefront battling a deadly disease.
A tender family tribute that adds domestic context to the usual Spanish flu narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73267-130-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2018
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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