An incidental treat for those addicted to Miss Read's English village tales (Celebrations at Thrush Green, 1993, etc.), those slyly gentle vignettes of neighborly to-ing and fro-ing where civility rules and the countryside is splendidly unspoiled. Here, now, is a collection of brief, affectionately humorous, schoolteacherly bits, based on the author's own short teaching career in rural hamlets in the 1920's. Most of the pieces (many published in Punch) appeared in England during the 1950's when Read's first book, Village School, led off a four-decade cavalcade of steady sellers. In an introduction, the author admits to an aim to ``entertain'' with an account of classroom follies and small village pleasures. And here, as always, her schoolmistress voice is light but firm, with self-deprecating bemusement, secure in lofty authoritarian status, missionand caste. (The children's very local wattle-and-daub diction is a source of not-too-innocent enjoyment.) In spite of the some dated formality and content, the classroom doings are appealing: One child, with ``willow wand arms,'' declares he's for home, resulting in a head-pounding gallop for teacher in pursuit of the mercurial ``horrid child''; then there are floral tributes from another student that arrive from a suspicious source; holiday rehearsals that include some bass singing (`` `It's Eric, Miss. He always honks like that' ''), as well as problems like a venerable leaking roof, a blizzard of interruptions, and a very uncertain discipline. In between are also moments of special (adult) joysas when Miss Read, consigned to offstage sleigh-bell ringing, herself sees, in the momentary eye of childhood, the imaginary ``reindeer spank ahead, heads tossing, silver plumes gushing from their scarlet nostrils into the bright air.'' Old times and timeless children. With illustrations by Kate Dicker that, like the sketches of John Goodall (who usually does the honors for Read), are stiffly naive but somehow just right.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71762-0
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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