A gripping, highly nostalgic dive into a decade and a high school sport.
A debut novel focuses on an athlete’s intense journey.
Sam Bagliarello is a 17-year-old student in Linden Grove, Illinois, in 1988. Sam’s life is severed into three timelines: his recent past climbing the social ladder at school and caddying at a golf club; his current recovery from the aftermath of a horrific car accident that leaves him dead for 51 seconds; and a year in the future when he is in the midst of the biggest race of his varsity track career. His quest for popularity in the first of these periods takes him to a house party where he drinks, embarrasses himself, and rides away on his bike, only to be struck by an errant driver at local landmark Spirit Hill. The battle to survive after severe injuries is long and hard, altering everything about Sam’s life. “It sounds like the easy road through senior year vanished with your bike. You’re going to have to get comfortable leaning on others for help even if you don’t like the idea,” his friend Sara tells him. With the help of his brother, Frank, a former high school football player who burned out in college, Sam takes up running and sets his sights on going to the state finals. Meanwhile, he still has to navigate his complicated connection with his family, his vision of his academic future, and the ins and out of high school relationships. Magluilo’s sports novel reads like a John Hughes movie that indulges in its love of the story’s setting, from the early Jane’s Addiction Sam listens to before races to Sara’s punk aesthetic. The book may appeal less to today’s teens and more to adults who grew up in the 1980s in that regard. Still, the author clearly did his research on track and field and is able to successfully convert this visual, fast-paced sport into vivid writing that will leave readers on the edges of their seats.
A gripping, highly nostalgic dive into a decade and a high school sport.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1578691456
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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