An intriguing but meandering swamp tale that incorporates shades of Southern gothic and fantasy.
A debut historical novel tells the story of a 19th-century doctor’s adventures in the otherworldly Okefenokee Swamp.
The year is 1885. Recently a resident intern at the Florida State Hospital (the “Asylum for the Insane”), Dr. Ben Bouvier arrives in Waycross, Georgia, to start a private medical practice in what he hopes will be a much more peaceful environment. It turns out to be anything but: After he moves into the town’s haunted house, Ben soon discovers a dying girl left on his front porch for medical treatment. Ben can’t save her, and when the town discovers her body the next day, Ben is suspected of murdering her. Chased out of Waycross by a literal lynch mob, Ben flees into the nearby Okefenokee Swamp. After a snakebite and a broken arm from a run-in with an alligator, Ben is rescued by Hattie, the witchy matriarch of a hidden swamp community. The inhabitants of star-shaped Heks Island are descended from runaway slaves and Army deserters, and they still welcome outcasts in need of a home. “And so we found ourselves a village,” goes their rhyme. “This bunch of castaways. / For mankind cast us off, and we survived / And came to stay.” So begins Ben’s yearslong adventures among the hidden worlds of the Okefenokee, which will take him to places he never could have expected. In this series opener, Harris writes in a detailed, slithering prose that captures the sinister magic of his romanticized vision of the Old South: “The wind’s fury had abated just after noon but pockets of small gusts still complained here and there, with short needle-like blasts of rain for a few seconds at a time, then dampish calm…until the next gust raced down a streambed or chased around a tree.” The book will likely divide readers based on their storytelling preferences. Some will bemoan the episodic structure, the moseying plot, and Hattie’s initially charming but quickly annoying nursery rhyme–style intrusions. But those entranced by the author’s finely crafted mood and setting will look forward to the sequel.
An intriguing but meandering swamp tale that incorporates shades of Southern gothic and fantasy.Pub Date: May 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4751-5165-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
