A rich family drama that clearly captures the complicated relationship between two siblings.
A family of Russian Jewish immigrants navigates life in Scotland’s Jewish community in King’s debut historical novel, set in the years surrounding World War II.
The Kaminskys fled Russia before the pogroms. Trying to make their way to America, they ran out of money and made their home in Edinburgh, hoping that it was far enough away from the rising anti-Semitism sweeping Russia and Europe. In Scotland, they opened a shop to sell fine ribbons, buttons, and gloves. Now, in 1932, Bess Kaminsky is doing her best to raise her daughters, the younger Addy and the elder Rose, since her husband, Joseph, died. The family takes in a boarder—an American medical student at the local university—to help make ends meet. As Bess frets over troubling radio reports coming out of Europe, her two daughters are distracted by the quiet student living under the same roof as them. The novel is told from the daughters’ third-person perspectives and details their tribulations as they search for husbands and happiness as a world war approaches. It’s divided into two parts, with Addy largely disappearing from the second half, shifting readers’ attention to Rose; this choice will likely disappoint those who’ve grown to like the spunky younger sister. The novel as a whole showcases King’s impeccable research, which is particularly evident in the string of contemporary novels that Rose voraciously reads and the captivating details about daily life in mid-20th-century Edinburgh. The story, which takes place from 1932 to 1947, includes a poignant, if heartbreaking, subplot about a soldier who returns from combat with extreme PTSD. King also persuasively captures Addy’s and Rose’s inner lives when they’re teenagers; it’s a heady time for the characters, and the author shows notable skill in bringing it to life.
A rich family drama that clearly captures the complicated relationship between two siblings.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64388-099-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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