Hynd's latest entry in the horror genre (A Room for the Dead, 1994, not reviewed): an uneven tale of past lives, guardian spirits, and treachery that's marked by both the best and the worst qualities of the author's spy novels. When Connecticut suburbanite Rebecca Moore is run off the road, shot at, and nearly killed by a beastlike stranger, the police have doubts that anyone was really trying murder her. Nonetheless, it seems a good time for Rebecca's husband, Bill, to take that job offered by his old college roommate in California. And so Bill, Rebecca, and children Patrick and Karen go to West Los Angeles, where they buy a Queen Anne house right next to the old San Angelo Cemetery. Later, confused by her husband's increasing coldness, Rebecca is floored when her children tell her that a man, ``Ronny,'' has been coming to keep an eye on them and will soon take them away. The children, in fact, do disappear one evening in the company of this ghostlike being: a creature Rebecca later discovers to be Billy Carlton, a silent-movie star, murdered over a half-century earlier, whose body recently burst out of its coffin in San Angelo, hurling a two-ton gravestone 60 feeta fact most intriguing to LAPD Detective Edmund Van Allen. Things heat up when the man who tried to kill Rebecca before comes to town gunning for her again, and Billy/``Ronny'' shows Van Allen who was really behind the plot to murder her, getting a little belated justice for himself while he's at it. Chilling ghost scenes enrich Hynd's suspense-powered plot, but disposable characters and subplots may inspire some to close the graveyard gates mid-service.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8217-5029-1
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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