A quiet yet powerful saga of imperfection and the struggle for family connection.
Following three generations of women, Polli’s debut traces an intricate web of family secrets as they are created, buried, and discovered.
It’s 1950, and Emily lives with her mentally unstable, alcoholic mother, Anna, and her Polish grandmother, Marishka. Emily’s father died when she was a baby, and she misses him desperately. After exploring Emily’s life, the novel flashes back in time to 1920, when newly arrived Polish immigrant Marishka was the young wife of a Polish coal miner in rural Pennsylvania. As she worries about her husband’s dangerous job and cares for her two daughters, Paulina and Anna, Marishka’s worst fears are realized when her husband is killed in the mines just before their third daughter, Eva, is born. The novel then returns to Emily before focusing on an older Paulina; the narrative alternates between them as Emily grows up wondering why her family is the way it is and Paulina realizes she has fallen in love with Anna’s husband just as baby Emily is born. Polli neatly dovetails the timelines, focusing on the parallel lives and pulling readers deeper into each woman’s life. Strand by strand, she reveals just a little more about each character, delicately intertwining the various threads of their existences in a way that subtly shows the complex emotional ties that exist between family members. The story grows honestly and organically, to borrow a phrase of Emily’s, and her emotional exploration feels cathartic without becoming cliché. When Marishka dies and Emily finally discovers the existence of her aunt Paulina—and the reasons why the family decided to disown Paulina and Emily’s own father—she reaches a turning point and decides to finally figure out who she wants to be and what her family means to her now that all the secrets have unfurled.
A quiet yet powerful saga of imperfection and the struggle for family connection.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991328161
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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