Self-important pretensions don’t deepen the shallow emotional waters in which these predictable characters swim. Brown is no...
In Brown’s first novel, an impressionable young woman drifts into animal rights terrorism, goes on the lam and reinvents herself with the help of noble Native Americans and true love.
After her Lebanese-born mother dies in childbirth, Margie grows up under the gentle but distant care of her usually drunk father. A waiflike beauty, she is so sensitive that her left ovary aches when she is stressed. As a lonely college freshman, she falls in love with her Latin professor, Simon, a middle-aged widower with a motherless 7-year-old daughter. Simon introduces her both to sexual passion and to the animal rights movement through his organization H.E.A.R.T., which pulls off small illegal acts like freeing birds from their pet-store cages to protest for animal rights. Then Simon dumps Margie and quits H.E.A.R.T., suggesting to the group’s typically quirky and diverse members that they put Margie in charge. For a girl who is always sighing about her shyness, Margie has no trouble dancing naked at a party or leading H.E.A.R.T. to burn down a restaurant that proudly serves exotic meat. No one is hurt, but afterward, an undercover policeman nabs Margie, not for arson, but for incendiary speech, when she gives an educational lecture on how to commit arson to prospective H.E.A.R.T. members. Before her trial date, H.E.A.R.T. member Bumble helps her flee to Montana, where she hides out with an Indian family whose matriarch, Granma, was friends with Bumble’s mother back during the AIM uprisings in the 1960s. Now, Granma lives off the land with her granddaughter Cora, whose mother is in jail for drugs, and with Cora’s dad, Jim, who works at a printing company. Soon enough, Granma and Jim have given Margie a new appreciation of nature and an understanding of the spiritual relationship that can exist between humans and the animals they hunt for food. Then Simon shows up and forces Margie to decide where she really belongs.
Self-important pretensions don’t deepen the shallow emotional waters in which these predictable characters swim. Brown is no Louise Erdrich.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53675-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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