by Nancy Rawles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2005
Intensely sad but not mawkish: a very fine love story, wonderfully narrated with a perfect feel for the time and place.
A tale of slave life in the Old South imagines the hidden life of Huck Finn’s sidekick, the runaway slave Jim.
It’s always risky to build a narrative around someone else’s characters, but second-novelist Rawles (Crawfish Dreams, 2003) handles Twain’s creations so deftly that it would be hard to imagine him objecting. Her narrator is one Sadie Watkins, an elderly sharecropper who was born a slave in Missouri. Growing up on the Watson plantation, Sadie met and fell in love with one of the field hands, a big, dapper slave named Jim. As masters go, Watson is better than most, but he’s still a long way from what anyone would call kindly. He doesn’t think twice about selling Jim downriver to raise some cash when his crops do badly, despite the fact that Jim and Sadie are married and have two children. Jim is a gentle soul not given to rebellion, but he runs away to make his own fate, promising Sadie that he’ll come back to her and the children when he can buy their freedom. Jim’s story we already know, of course, since he hooked up with a boy named Huck Finn and rafted his way up the Mississippi. But Sadie’s history is just as engaging, if rather less adventurous. Passed along like a poker chip from master to master, Sadie lives through the Civil War, gains her freedom, becomes a refugee, and makes and re-makes several lives for herself down the years. She and Jim are reunited and parted several times, but there are few happy endings for blacks (whether slave or free) in the 19th century. Her hopes eventually center upon her niece Marianne, born a freewoman, who as part of the new generation has the chance of a decent life.
Intensely sad but not mawkish: a very fine love story, wonderfully narrated with a perfect feel for the time and place.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5400-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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