A sentimental parable about how a young girl’s miracles arise from the power of her faith alone.
In Szondy’s debut Christian novel, a young girl cures a paralyzed friend and then performs other divine miracles in an idyllic American town, changing people’s lives.
Sara Hopkins, an 8-year old girl, prays beside a lake to bring a sparrow back to life. Later, she insists to friends and family that she saw Jesus, and that it was the power of faith that resurrected the bird. She then heals her wheelchair-bound friend, Mark, and then performs several other miracles. Soon, the resulting media attention threatens to overwhelm her quiet all-American family and its bucolic lifestyle. Her astonishing deeds also garner the interest of two priests, who contemplate her candidacy for sainthood. Meanwhile, a doctor diagnoses Sara with a brain tumor that, he suggests, could have caused her to hallucinate her vision of Jesus. As the girl awaits a life-or-death operation, her grandfather Sam, her brother Danny, and the families of those that she cured go to the lake. Their experience there inspires them to go to the hospital, where the kids in the group steal a car to take Sara back to the lake with them. This well-constructed, if syrupy, novel flows well, but its quirks may mar readers’ enjoyment. In particular, inopportune mentions of brand names, perhaps intended to add realism, instead distract; for example, one person views a TV report on an “I-pad” and Sara’s father is described as “shaking in his Nikes” at the prospect of losing his daughter. Overall, this tale, titled after a biblical reference, will certainly reaffirm the beliefs of pious Christians, who may find solace in it as they wrestle with their own doubts and questions about faith. More worldly readers, though, may find its folksy style too simplistic to suspend their disbelief.
A sentimental parable about how a young girl’s miracles arise from the power of her faith alone.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971369-3-7
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Trailmaker Productions
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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