An intriguing, if uneven, contemporary fantasy that veers from the personal to the epic.
In Jackson’s (The Adventures of my Grandpa Bert, 2013; etc.) afterlife fantasy, a recently deceased man must learn the rules and secrets of the spirit world to save a little girl and fight a great evil.
Taven begins, like many heroes, confused by the world around him. For unexplained reasons, people ignore him and memories assault him. He eventually realizes that he’s dead, and he soon meets several other spectral inhabitants, including an unhelpful suicide, dead smokers obsessed with getting their nicotine fixes and a gang of ghostly gamblers. After Taven gets hit by a truck (in a moment of Looney Tunes–like comedy), he finds a series of spirits willing to teach him, but each has his or her own view of the afterlife and how to spend it. Aunt Sophie, for example, tells him to never stop growing; Fiona tells him that happiness is the most important thing in life (and death) and takes him diving into a young girl’s dreams; and his late brother Finn spends all his time helping people. Taven eventually learns that everything is not as it seems; it turns out that Fiona and her “dream junkies” are dangerous and that Taven has been unknowingly threatening his relationship with his family—and, soon, an even more dangerous power is revealed. This propels him on a fast-paced, high-stakes quest that contrasts with his earlier, slow-paced wandering. Although readers will likely welcome this transition, later revelations make the second half feel almost like a different book, as the sentimental lessons of the first half are replaced by action set pieces in people’s dreams. The inconsistent pacing and tone hamper the reading experience, as do occasional typos (“waived” instead of “waved”; “titled” instead of “tilted”) and awkward phrasing (“A woman had torn up a dripping with juices, perfectly cooked, hamburger”).
An intriguing, if uneven, contemporary fantasy that veers from the personal to the epic.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479319947
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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