A tense and distressing tale of a sad and all-too-common kidnapping in an exotic land.
A look at the sex trade in East Asia, told as a suspense novel.
This work follows a Vietnam War veteran who returns to his old battlefields to try to save his granddaughter’s life. It all begins when Peter Trutch is interrupted one sunny afternoon by a letter from overseas. An Australian graduate student named Andrew Quang has located a 40-something man in Vietnam named Nguyen Le Ngoc, who claims to be Trutch’s biological son. Trutch is taken aback but recognizes that it’s plausible: in 1971, on medical leave in Nha Trang, he entered into a liaison with a local woman named Dream. Alarmingly, Ngoc’s daughter Lien—Trutch’s granddaughter—appears to have vanished, and her family fears she’s been abducted into the world of underage sex trafficking. Flying back to Vietnam to help search for her, a “knight in shining armor,” Trutch will face a harrowing underworld full of “pimps, thugs, mean-looking bouncers and cops blind to whatever nefarious activity is raging around them.” In three interwoven narrative strands, the book tells of Trutch’s journey in search of Lien, his wife Catherine’s attempts to better understand her husband’s secret, and Lien’s own horrifying story. Eventually, Trutch’s journey—like the war in which he once took part—leads him across the Cambodian border to Phnom Penh’s little Vietnam, Svay Pak. There, shots ring out, Lien cowers in an obscure room out of sight, and seedy officials warn the determined veteran: “You use many big English words. But they do not justify your desire to interfere with our way of life.” Vietnam veteran and humanitarian Logan (co-author: Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart, with Elaine Head, 2013) has been familiar with this region all his adult life and describes it knowingly. Here and there, readers are reminded of the old horrors of the Vietnam War and the re-education camps and the raw feelings that still circulate around them. The author deftly details Lien’s plight. Readers learn of the “rape chambers,” cattle prods, meager food, and regular beatings the kidnapped girls must endure and their constant fear. While some readers may be misled by the novel’s oddly bucolic cover, the dangerous world described therein remains all too real. It’s important that readers be woken up to it.
A tense and distressing tale of a sad and all-too-common kidnapping in an exotic land.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-690-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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