by Pamela Crane ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017
On its own, a gripping tale of revenge and redemption.
Two psyche-scarred women, bound by tragic pasts and family secrets, vow to find out whether a man’s death was a suicide or murder.
Ari Wilburn was 10 when a hit-and-run driver killed her 8-year-old sister, Carli. That tragedy estranged Ari from her parents, especially her mother, who blamed her for Carli’s death. She’s not alone: Ari blames herself as well and has memories of pushing her sister just before the accident. She is banished to a childhood of group homes, foster care, and juvenile detention. A suicide survivor, she starts a support group where she meets Tina Alvarez, who has an even more harrowing past and is reeling from the death of her father, Josef, which the police have determined is a suicide. Tina’s story awakens something in Ari, and she promises to help her discover whether Josef was actually murdered. “Not out of obligation,” Ari states. “But because my decayed muscle of a heart had survived my life, and for once I cared about something. Someone. Perhaps I was human after all.” The risk of spoilers prohibits a deeper plot synopsis. The tale unfolds in chapters told from alternating perspectives, including those of Rosalita, Josef’s mother, who quite correctly prophesized when her son was an infant that he was evil; Tina, who harbors unspeakable secrets; and a killer with a definite agenda (“I’m no sociopath…I’ve been watching, waiting patiently for my turn”) that may expand to include Tina and Ari. As Ari becomes embroiled in Tina’s situation, she begins to uncover a terrifying connection to her own family. She starts to question whether Carli’s death was an accident. Crane’s (The Scream of Silence, 2016, etc.) latest novel is a dark ride; so bleak that even Gillian Flynn might say, “Lighten up.” Crane wallows in the victims’ blood. It pools, oozes, sloshes, and seeps. Eerie foreshadowing (the Ari chapter headings count the days until her death) and twisted revelations keep the pages turning, but the author’s empathy for her “broken” characters adds humanity to the macabre proceedings. Crane has two other ongoing series to her credit. That this becomes an origin story that sets a character up to be a private eye in future installments doesn’t quite feel organic.
On its own, a gripping tale of revenge and redemption.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-940662-11-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tabella House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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