Details of love and loss, and especially the images of Africa, are poignant enough here, but Maud—and all she...
After a career in magazine copyediting, 72-year-old Danze spins a quietly moving tale of destiny and romance in colonial West Africa, as a young naval cadet encounters the unconventional woman who will be the love of his life.
Son of a physician turned gold speculator, David Unger at 17 has one idea about what the future will hold: service in the Royal Navy, followed by a quiet life in South Africa, where his father went bust and his mother abandoned them. But meeting Maud King, a serene ethnologist with a deep thirst for knowledge about the unspoiled African interior, quickly turns his head. Smitten, he starts bringing her mail to her, then helps her gather the samples and material she needs. He saves her from a deadly scorpion sting and they grow increasingly close, but when he has to go home and is immediately drafted to fight the Zulu (who capture him and from whom he makes a daring escape), they lose touch. Bereft, David goes to study in London, and there reads in the British press of Maud’s explorations as she works her way through West Africa. A full-blown hero when she finally returns to England, she tracks David down, and their former intimacy resumes—but only briefly. Maud is keen to return to Africa; David has no choice but to let her go. Again they lose touch, and only after more heartbreaking years have passed and he has nearly finished work for his medical degree does he find a trace of her. He leaves to be with her at once, but when he arrives, he finds only tragedy.
Details of love and loss, and especially the images of Africa, are poignant enough here, but Maud—and all she represents—falls short of finding a separate place in the story, seen as she is only through her lover’s heated gaze.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-9671851-3-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: GreyCore
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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