A hyperactive ride for fans of high-octane fiction.
An engaging romp through the fast, furious world of professional motor sports.
South Florida novelist Ducote draws on her life as the globe-trotting wife of decorated race car driving professional Chapman Ducote in a bracing novel that swells with action and intrigue. Coleton Loren, one of Miami Beach’s fastest and most successful race car drivers, is handsome, shrewd and, for his chosen sport, uncharacteristically tall. His racing prowess has earned him not only fame but an opulent lifestyle that feeds his ego and his womanizing. Nothing, however, prepares him for an unexpected accident on the track that fractures his right leg. Although the injury jeopardizes his chances in the upcoming Le Mans racing series, it also introduces him to young, beautiful Dr. Camilla Harlow, commissioned to rehabilitate the dashing racer back to prime form. She soon finds herself unethically enamored of her needy patient, and embroiled in Loren’s adrenaline-fueled lifestyle. Ducote creatively portrays the story’s secondary characters, including Loren’s ruthless, former racing team owner Jose Gomez (who’s constantly at odds with Loren’s agent, Ira Goldstein); wealthy financier Arthur Elrod; and George Wachner, Loren’s longtime friend and an aging Le Mans pro driver, who’s reluctant to retire before defeating his nemesis, Klaus Ulrick. The story moves at a brisk clip and incorporates just enough sex, action, duplicity, murder and coast-to-coast melodrama to keep readers glued to the page. Ducote employs plenty of racing vernacular and knows the fast-paced, thrilling racing atmosphere well; she notes in her acknowledgments that many plot twists are derived from real-life events. At more than 400 pages, readers may find the story a bit bloated at times, and some of the prose a bit awkward, but those who enjoy a rollicking story full of twists, turns, action and romance will surely be satisfied. Ducote’s cliffhanger ending is a true shocker and hints at possible further installments in Coleton Loren’s wild world.
A hyperactive ride for fans of high-octane fiction.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-578-12199-4
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Warchest Publishing, LLC.
Review Posted Online: June 11, 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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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