An engrossing tale nicely balancing war and peace.
This gripping thriller is about love and the Troubles—the love of a man and woman for each other, for freedom and for Ireland.
Davy McCutcheon, introduced in Pray for Us Sinners (2000), is a bomb maker for the Provisional IRA. He's deeply in love with Fiona Kavanagh, but he's been sentenced to decades in the Maze prison. She immigrates to Vancouver and in time comes to love another man—but her love for Davy never dies. Then, after nine years, Davy and fellow inmates stage a prison break. Unlike some others, Davy decides he's through with violence. All he wants is to reunite with Fiona, which will be a tough task indeed. Never mind that she may have moved on forever. He may not even make it out of Northern Ireland alive, because his comrades insist on using his skills for their dangerous plot to bomb a police barracks. The novel’s setting goes back and forth between Fiona’s Vancouver and Davy’s County Tyrone. Fiona now leads a peaceful life with a decent job and a good man, while Davy may be recaptured or killed at any moment. Both storylines are engrossing, but all the real action is with Davy. The killing, the weapons caches, the plotting and betrayal contrast sharply with the idyllic freedom of a peaceful and quiet Vancouver; the only common feature of both settings is the rain. Although this book is a sequel, it reads well as a stand-alone thriller/love story. Davy wants no part of killing anymore, but the choice may not be his. Can he find love and peace, or must he bomb his way to freedom? Taylor writes in rich physical and cultural detail, holding the reader’s attention right to the end.
An engrossing tale nicely balancing war and peace.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3519-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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