A historical novel whose empathetic view of women’s lives—and the decisions they face—is welcome in any time period.
Kullberg offers a debut historical novel set amid the illegal sex and abortion trades of mid-20th-century Portland, Oregon.
When 16-year-old Mae Rose’s mother, the proprietor of a shabby rural Oregon rooming house, dies during an illegal abortion, Mae is left alone in the world. She makes her way to Portland, finding that, at the height of the Great Depression, no one in the big city cares whether an orphan girl lives or dies. After nearly starving in the streets, getting sexually harassed by a potential employer, and briefly falling under the sway of a brutal pimp, Mae meets her friend and savior, a beautiful, mixed-race, opium-addicted prostitute named Trudy. Mae’s short, rough life has shown her that men will always treat her as a sex object, so she decides that she might as well take control of the situation and earn some good money. She and Trudy become popular call girls among the corrupt political and business elite of World War II–era Portland. After falling in love with a polio-stricken investigative journalist and receiving an illegal abortion from real-life society figure Ruth Barnett, Mae quits sex work to become Barnett’s assistant. This position gives her a firsthand view of the persecution of abortion providers in the reactionary postwar era. Kullberg’s novel is a clear polemic: she wants to illuminate the conditions that preceded the legalization of abortion in the United States and to highlight the contributions of pioneers such as Barnett. Even the greatest polemic novels—such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935)—can’t avoid making heavy-handed plot points, as Kullberg’s does. Still, the author’s sensitive portrayal of Mae and other young women as they face dire situations humanizes the narrative: “So profoundly had she been excavated,” Kullberg writes of Mae after her abortion, “she felt neither relief nor regret. Only a spooky absence of sentiment, as though her feelings had been scoured out as well.” Ultimately, the nuanced characterization and social message serve each other, reaffirming the idea that the personal is indeed political.
A historical novel whose empathetic view of women’s lives—and the decisions they face—is welcome in any time period.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941072-24-0
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Bygone Era Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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