A sometimes-evocative but inconsistent set of poems.
Lahey’s debut poetry collection follows the speaker’s lifelong struggles with depression, alcohol abuse, and loneliness.
This set’s works are most effective when the speaker discusses his friends, family, and childhood, as those subjects yield personal details, clear images, and a cohesive story. In “Pops,” for instance, the speaker shares memories of his father, “Skating on a pond with frogs, / Racing at the back of the trailers, / Reading the morning comics.” These images make the larger sentiments (“the best damn father a boy could have”) feel more meaningful. “The Wolf” points out “It really is simple: / The wolf you will be, / The black or the white, / The one that you feed,” while in “The White Wolf,” the speaker asserts: “The white wolf is me”—essentially, one who chooses to fight against his vices, instead of giving into them. This essential choice provides the collection’s central main theme. The poet often achieves the tone of a nursery rhyme in his works, which is disturbing and even haunting in the more hard-edged poems. On the other hand, some verses pay insufficient attention to detail; in “12,” for instance, the speaker broadly says, “I felt so alive and cool. / Little did I know, still a young boy, / That I was nothing but a naive fool,” which makes it difficult to actually visualize the boy. This collection might have been stronger if the speaker had shown how his emotions spurred him to action, instead of merely stating them, and allowed readers to witness his pain and suffering firsthand. In “Life,” the speaker relies on clichéd phrases (“Here one day / Gone the next”; “Life is too short”); these might have lingered with readers if the rest of the poems were stronger, instead of relying on vague, basic concepts of light and dark.
A sometimes-evocative but inconsistent set of poems.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66320-399-1
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart and touchingly sympathetic fictional portrayal of an enigmatic woman.
A historical novel about the once-famous American socialite Dorothy Hale.
Former NBC News producer Hamilton has chosen a subject of her debut novel who’s likely best remembered today as the focus of a famous 1939 painting by Frida Kahlo. In the 1920s and ’30s, the intelligent, attractive, and sophisticated Hale ran in glamorous circles that included future member of Congress and ambassador Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Luce). Hale tried to break into a career in show business, and history has largely judged her as a thwarted figure—someone whose lack of success in entertainment or in love (she was divorced once and had several ill-starred affairs) eventually drove her to leap from her Central Park South apartment window to her death—the very act that Kahlo immortalized in her aforementioned work, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. In this novel, Hamilton sets out to tell a much fuller story, taking readers on a lightly fictionalized tour of Hale’s upbringing and spending a satisfying amount of time on her complex, loving second marriage to artist Gardner Hale. The narrative also lavishes attention on Dorothy’s increasingly deep friendship with Clare, who manages to do in this novel what she always managed to do in real life—get all the best lines: “Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount,” she writes to Dorothy at one point. At another moment that showcases Hamilton’s ear for conversation and talent for pacing, Gardner tells Dorothy, “You know of course that I am happier than I’ve ever been and will remain so if it’s just the two of us forevermore,” which prompts Dorothy to remember one of Luce’s remarks: “Forevermore is shorter than you think.” Overall, the author’s narrative is smooth and invitingly readable, wearing its clearly considerable research lightly; her version of Dorothy’s doomed relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s adviser and Works Progress Administration administrator Harry Hopkins is surprisingly gripping. The narrative never stoops to easy renditions, and as a result, Dorothy emerges as both a charismatic and vulnerable figure.
A smart and touchingly sympathetic fictional portrayal of an enigmatic woman.Pub Date: March 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-663272-5
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An upbeat but uneven tale of an altruistic bodybuilder.
A man embarks on a quest to help the people around him while refining and building his own physique in this novel.
Tom, a gay man in small-town Rhode Island, is a self-described “warrior.” He paints himself as a kindly average Joe but whose dedication to good manners marks him as among a class of people he thinks of as warriors—humanitarians who fight for the benefit of the public. The narrative that follows considers the different ways Tom injects positivity during a happenstance journey through the world of bodybuilding. After feeling motivated by the “before” and “after” shots in a fitness book, Tom signs up for training sessions at xCellFitness, where he is promptly introduced to the idea of becoming a bodybuilder and taking on his central warrior project of toning his physique. He meets a trainer named Lee, who is down on his luck, dealing with a nasty divorce, living in his parents’ basement, and finding himself the subject of gay rumors. Lee encourages Tom to become a bodybuilder and volunteers to be his trainer. But Tom’s motive in accepting this arrangement is “Project Lee”: to make the trainer see that “he is loved.” Caesar’s idea behind this book, to show Tom helping Lee as well as aiding or connecting with co-workers and neighbors during various goodwill missions, is heartfelt and endearing. The author has also created a sympathetic hero and an intriguing cast of characters. Along the way, Caesar delivers a rich portrait of the bodybuilding world, offering evocative details. Yet the tale’s earnestness sometimes walks too fine a line between candid and sentimental. The story wraps up with an ending that’s a bit saccharine. Though Tom is successful in toning his body, bite-sized chapters aren’t sufficiently lean, concluding with unnecessary musings. The way these chapters are structured, explained in the work’s introduction, also presents a few issues. With background that turns into stylized dialogue (mimicking a film script) that turns into summary, each chapter feels like the same exercise, which, by the end of the novel, may challenge some readers more than going to the gym.
An upbeat but uneven tale of an altruistic bodybuilder.Pub Date: July 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73670-772-2
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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