An unsatisfying novel that hits expected genre notes but fails to challenge its readers.
A newly married couple suffer severe, unexpected setbacks in this Christian novel from Campbell (Who Will Hear Them Cry, 2012).
Jim Miller is the pastor of Grace Church in wealthy Adamsville, Virginia. He’s just become engaged to the church’s organist, Amy Brandt, and the two are madly in love. However, when the U.S. invades Iraq, Jim’s military reserve unit is called up, forcing the couple to move up their wedding date. Jim goes to war and soon ends up in a hospital in Germany; however, his mother is still listed as his next of kin, and she won’t tell Amy details of what happened. When Jim is shipped back home, Amy rushes to meet him but, on the way, sustains a concussion and a broken leg in a car accident. Later, she learns that Jim has been permanently blinded as a result of a head wound. “Oh, my darling,” Amy tells him when she finally sees him, “you’ll never know how I’ve wished I could give you my sight and take your blindness.” To make matters worse, after they get back to Adamsville, the congregation votes to remove Jim as pastor, believing that he’ll be unable to fulfill his duties. As the Millers’ faith, and marriage, is stretched to its limits, they hear of a job opening in the tiny town of Pleasantville, and what they find there may be just what they need to get back on track. Campbell effectively manages to fashion a modern Job story of sorts, and Christian readers may enjoy watching the Millers rise to the occasion as they face various obstacles. The book is a bit overly sentimental, however; the prose style is often treacly, as when Amy sees Jim for the very first time: “She had been so absorbed by those eyes that she hadn’t noticed anything else. His skin was deeply tanned, and he had the kind of mouth that seemed made for smiling.” Overall, neither the plot nor the characters ever feels very realistic, and as such, the conclusion of this faith parable doesn’t feel particularly revelatory.
An unsatisfying novel that hits expected genre notes but fails to challenge its readers.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-951461-18-8
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Goldtouch Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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