by Paul Dale Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 26, 2015
An unflinching portrait of a victim-turned-predator; sometimes repulsive but unquestionably potent.
A young woman who survived a brutal rape seeks retribution against her assailants while directing homicidal rage at men in general in Anderson’s (Winds, 2015, etc.) unforgiving thriller.
The four men who raped and mutilated teenager Megan Williams four years ago left her for dead. She pulls through, awakening from a coma and undergoing reconstructive surgery. Cops think the rapists, still at large, had intended to attack Megan’s then-roommate and older sister, Susan. Megan concurs with the vengeance-minded woman secretly living near Susan, convinced the men will, in due course, follow her sister home from Terri’s Restaurant where she waitresses. Megan, however, hates every male she spots eying her or Susan, and anyone who takes Megan home will suffer relentless torture. Columnist Rodney Engleworth, a former investigative journalist, notes similarities between recent murders and Megan’s attack, with male bodies mutilated in ways comparable to Megan. But there have been other rapes/murders with the same modus operandi over the last several years, and sure enough, Megan sees a man at Terri’s who she believes is one of her attackers. Rod, his editor, Timothy Goodman, and Officer Elsie Dorr track down an unidentified woman caught on camera with one of the victims. At the same time, Megan, with a loaded gun, waits for her suspect to contact his three equally guilty friends. The novel is merciless, with the abused main character committing barbaric acts. In Megan’s first-person perspective, she’s seemingly conversing with the men she’s butchering, but that may be only in her head. She apathetically details her rape and explicitly relays what she’s doing to the men, including mutilating genitals. The investigating team can occasionally be too dense: they initially don’t suspect Megan due to her physical condition, though no one’s seen her (not even Susan) for six months. Sympathy comes in the form of Rod, a widower who lost his wife, Helen, to cancer. But he saturates pages with more dourness, at one point equating Helen with an old car that a mechanic (doctor) couldn’t fix. Fortunately, scenes hinting at a romance between Tim and Elsie temporarily relieve the story of its gloomy tone. The ending is appropriately dark but satisfactory.
An unflinching portrait of a victim-turned-predator; sometimes repulsive but unquestionably potent.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-937491-17-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: 2AM Publications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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