Doughtie has tendered an understated, sophisticated, revealing legal entertainment that leaves the reader wanting more.
Retired jurist Doughtie presents a twisty legal drama of nasty doings in northern Florida.
Judge Alva “AC” Cason sits on the bench of Florida’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, hearing and passing judgment on the miseries spilled out in the family division. Much of the business is sad but tedious: “He thought he could do this job in his sleep, but remembered he sometimes did just that, which was generally frowned upon.” Doughtie is having fun here, for AC is drawn as a warm and decent man, learned, confident and ethical, informed but not flouting. He is a rich character, as are the other principals, whose complexity gives the story its pleasing misdirection and color. Doughtie ably handles a number of strands—an increasingly ugly child dependency case, a crooked judge, rich folks ruining everything, a con man overstepping his moral boundaries and a surging romantic relationship between AC and caseworker—as he authentically engages the legal system. It is clear that Doughtie loves the legal profession, though he is not above teasing it: “Judge AC tried to exhibit the concerned expression of a person with hemorrhoids”; he revels in explaining courtroom minutiae with expository narrative that only feels forced when he takes it outside judicial business, as when detailing the con man’s tricks. Equal to, if not transcending, the legal aspects of the story is the love affair of AC and Vicky, sweetly and very physically presented, yet, thankfully, unlike the law, not minutely. Indeed, Doughtie keeps the tale quite everyday, avoiding the theatrical and extravagant, but allowing for him to give time pondering such elements as the Florida landscape that he loves as much as the law: turkey oaks and wiregrass, the rosemary bushes and tumbledown farms, the dozy inland river ways and the pencil factory that ate all the cedars. The final pages offer a dumbfounding surprise, and an emotional cliffhanger.
Doughtie has tendered an understated, sophisticated, revealing legal entertainment that leaves the reader wanting more.Pub Date: May 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425103590
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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