Sonia is hard to care about, so her arguments pro and con baby–raising carry less weight than they should.
A Brooklyn woman flips out when she discovers she’s pregnant with her third child in this first novel by Bomer, whose previous short story collection (Baby and Other Stories, 2010) took a steely-eyed, unromantic view of motherhood.
As the novel opens, Sonia is about to give birth to her third baby, alone in a hospital in Philadelphia. Flash back eight months. Sonia is a bourgeois yet hip (if that’s not an oxymoron?) wife and mother who has put aside her ambitions as a painter for the time being in order to care for 4-year-old Tom and 2-year-old Michael. She doesn’t have to work because husband Dick, a hazily drawn nice guy, earns a good living doing some kind of worthwhile research. Now that the boys are old enough for pre-school, Sonia is thinking about starting to paint again. And, no longer overwhelmed by the exhaustion of caring for small babies, she and Dick have rekindled their sexual relationship. The ironic result is Sonia’s unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. Sonia has never been exactly in love with being a mommy, but she doesn’t want the responsibility of choosing to terminate. Pregnancy only exaggerates a propensity toward self-absorption as she and Dick dither away the first trimester arguing but not deciding whether to abort. Meanwhile, Sonia ’s ambivalence toward Brooklyn itself increases. She has diminishing patience with parenting peer pressure—the emphasis on nutrition, on finding the perfect school, on making sure one’s child is properly diagnosed for trendy learning and social disorders. But, a Brooklyn cultural snob, she suffers a panic attack while house hunting in the suburbs. Finally, toward the end of her second trimester, Sonia snaps. Leaving the boys with long-suffering Dick, she heads off in her car. For the talky last trimester of the novel she revisits not only the people and places of her past, but also her pre-marriage persona to ready herself for permanent adulthood.
Sonia is hard to care about, so her arguments pro and con baby–raising carry less weight than they should.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61695-146-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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