An affecting drama about the unmoored life of a woman whose infant was kidnapped 40 years ago.
Ally Green has come back to her father’s house in North Carolina’s low country, but not soon enough to hear his deathbed wish that she settle down. Strange advice for a 60-year-old woman, but Ally has been running away for a long time. As a child she befriended Vesey Washington, the black boy who lived on the other side of the river. The two would fish together, swap secrets and dreams and comfortable silences. As Ally grew, she fell in love with Vesey; in the civil-rights–era South, those were dangerous feelings. She ran to college, and then to a career as a stewardess, and then when she had a child out of wedlock at the same time as Vesey and his wife, she flew with her baby to Kathmandu. There her baby was kidnapped, and Ally spends the next 38 years running away from the crushing heartache of that moment. It took her daddy’s death to bring her back to her childhood home, and to Vesey, now widowed across the river. Slid in between Ally’s story is Sunila’s journey. A blue-eyed Nepalese woman who has lived her whole life in debt bondage, she escapes the stone yard with a secret, and the book of drawings found with her as an infant. Sunila makes it to the American Embassy with an incredible story confessed by her adoptive mother: as a baby she was kidnapped from a young American in a café. The book was Ally’s journal, filled with sketches of Vesey. As Ally harbors vague romantic notions about Vesey, she also begins to recognize the holding pattern her life has been in, first for want of Vesey, and then her stolen daughter. Seitz allows her story to quietly unfold as the two women come together, guaranteeing a few tears, for the women and the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59554-505-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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