A keen tale with a teen protagonist who will certainly earn readers’ sympathies and support.
A young, withdrawn girl whom everyone seemingly ignores may be fading away—quite literally—in this YA drama.
Thirteen-year-old Zylia Moss is an invisible girl. That’s how she feels in a large family consisting of her parents, grandmother, and five siblings. At both home and school, people seem oblivious to her presence: It’s as if Zylia appears out of nowhere or vanishes without anyone noticing. Even if she manages to catch folks’ attention, it’s the type she doesn’t want, as when they witness an embarrassing stumble. But Zylia soon fears she’s genuinely disappearing, stemming from the story of Angelica, the long-lost, presumed dead great-aunt she’s never known. Zylia’s dementia-ridden grandmother is convinced that the teenager is just like Angelica, with an apparent ability to fade into another world. Zylia searches for answers in the family’s attic, which contains a few particulars on Angelica, including a diary. But what Zylia ultimately finds is another girl her age who, not unlike Zylia herself, suffers in silence. Zylia wants to help this girl, but once she experiences what she describes as an “out-of-body movement,” she comes dangerously close to Angelica’s supposed fate—vanishing for good. Despite hints of the supernatural, Mount (The Nanny Song, 2018) wisely keeps the story vague. For example, it’s unclear for the majority of the novel whether or not Zylia’s predicament is literal or metaphorical. In either case, the tale effectively addresses adolescent troubles, namely meek, unpopular Zylia’s relentless loneliness. Though supporting characters aren’t typically likable, especially some obnoxious eighth-grade students, the author offers relief with Zylia’s sweet little sister, Ivy; a new friend, Terra Grant; and a genial crush, Josh Pierceton. There’s likewise humor: Most people, other than her family, mispronounce Zylia’s name in varying ways. The prose throughout is precise and illustrative: “There were frozen chunks of ice caught up in places along the water’s edge, but I could hear the liquid flowing below, unimpeded by the temperature.”
A keen tale with a teen protagonist who will certainly earn readers’ sympathies and support.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9996556-5-8
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Between the Lines Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2019
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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