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Easter Sunday 1956

A FAMILY MEMOIR

An immigrant story with universal appeal.

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A young boy witnesses family dysfunction and tragedy in the wake of his seaman uncle’s arrival in New York.

After 50 years, Jack, a ship’s carpenter in the British Merchant Service, is on his last ship before his retirement, and New York, where his brother and his family live, is his final port of call. “The sea has been good to me, blewdy good,” he mutters. “So it’s on now to the next chapter of my life—a crusty ol’ Liverpool pensioner, fillin’ ’is days with pipe, paper, and the occasional pint at Baltic Fleet Pub.” Bird (A Rough Road, 2011, etc.) ominously sets the stage for dire things to come with a gut-punch sentence: “But Jack will never return to England.” The author’s debut memoir chronicled his bout with polio in 1940 at the age of 4. This next chapter in the family saga is set in 1956, the year when the raucous records of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and other fledgling rockers began turning up on jukeboxes in the pubs frequented (to excess) by 7-year-old Johnny’s father, Bill. This compact book is of a piece, but it is defined by two incidents. The first concerns a family party in honor of Jack’s visit. Bird deftly sketches the close-knit family and friends, including Margaret, the homely sister of Johnny’s mother, Nan, with a predilection for watching TV wrestling; Martin Moran, a recent émigré, who comes from “beyond the far”; and Bill, whose drunken antics on this night will expose the resentments of his wife of 25 years and who administers a shattering payback. The second incident, about which the less said the better, concerns Bill and Johnny’s Easter Sunday visit to Jack’s ship and the aftermath that cements family ties. Bird exhibits a keen ear for English and Irish dialects and the folk tunes that bind the Astoria, Queens, neighbors, as well as a respect for ritual. At the party for Jack, “Nan softly sings ‘Mother Machree’ and Margaret follows with ‘Home to Mayo,’ each delivered with sweet longing.” The slippery rules of memoir allow for conversations to which the author could not possibly have been privy, but they read as emotionally true.

An immigrant story with universal appeal. 

Pub Date: June 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-692-63450-9

Page Count: 134

Publisher: The Big Apple-Hellgate Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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