A meandering story would have been more engaging with a more active protagonist.
Ames offers a debut bildungsroman about a world-weary young Canadian woman who’s smart about business but less savvy about relationships.
Angie Cohen is 17 when her father dies, but she has two memorable brushes with death very soon afterward. First, at her high school’s semiformal dance, held at a funeral home, Angie has a sexual encounter with her date among some coffins; then she learns of the death of a close childhood friend. Angie feels bound by a sense of duty to her late father, so she devotes herself to running his coffee-machine maintenance business after graduating from high school. Between servicing the VendKing 2000 coffee vending machines and coffee makers at real-estate offices, strategizing about growing the business, and dreaming about traveling through Europe, Angie sidelines her plans to attend college. What follows is an episodic account of Angie’s stop-and-start efforts to find a fulfilling future; she also takes the words of a writer friend to heart: “Isn’t that what life is about? Chasing down your past.” Later, in Paris, Angie becomes involved with an artist and helps to kick-start his career—but forfeits a deferred acceptance to a university. When she returns home to Canada, she works as a bartender, and one gap year turns into two. Angie starts classes at one school, then leaves and starts again at another. The novel offers a character study of a young woman struggling with grief and possible depression. However, as Angie heals from her father’s death and finds her own way in life, there aren’t any compelling obstacles to her development, except her own indecision and uncertainty. Although the narration notes, “You make your own shit. Angie had proven this so far,” this description doesn’t quite ring true, as the protagonist is a consistently passive character who bounces from one place to another, even as she laments her lack of purpose. One enjoyable element of the book, though, is the depiction of Angie’s considerable business skills; she always has ideas for improvements—although at her bartending job, the higher-ups don’t effectively make use of her practical mind.
A meandering story would have been more engaging with a more active protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-989718-00-1
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Link & Ava Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 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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