A compelling coming-of-age tale set against the background of mid-20th-century rural New York and the burgeoning civil...
A black ex-convict and a young white boy form an unlikely friendship in the early 1960s in this debut novel of racism and redemption.
In May 1963, a Georgia man named Redmond Williams is released from New York City’s Rikers Island prison. Seeking to avoid trouble and start a new life, he heads upstate, where he sets up housekeeping in an abandoned railroad shack by a swamp on the outskirts of the town of Porter Mills, tucked between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River. Ten-year-old Caleb Walden is also drawn to the swamp, both by the memory of his father, who drowned there two years earlier, and by the need to escape persecution by his mother Ruby’s new boyfriend, Hurley Cobbs. When Redmond meets Caleb at the edge of the marsh, he is unwillingly won over by the boy’s generous openness, and the two form a mutual bond of companionship and respect. Unfortunately, the shiftless and deeply prejudiced Hurley makes it his business to drive Redmond out of town while at the same time risking Caleb and Ruby’s farm with his small-time criminal enterprise. Will an honest sheriff and the friendship of a fatherless boy be enough to keep Redmond’s past from destroying his future? Doty weaves a gripping tale, and the two mismatched protagonists come to life on the page as realistically sympathetic characters. While Hurley is one-dimensionally evil, the author provides a glimpse into a painful childhood that offers some elucidation of the roots of his racism. The novel’s ’60s setting is skillfully evoked, from the names of penny candies such as Mary Janes and Atomic Fire Balls to telling quotes from President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Also well-drawn is the precarious state of late childhood, characterized both by simple scenes of rural enjoyment and the constant danger of cruelty from disrespectful adults. Side plots such as Hurley’s moonshine scheme and Caleb’s and his friends’ fears of a legendary old swamp woman add both humor and suspense. Frequent repetition of an offensive racial epithet may disturb some readers, but its use is realistic and clearly condemned in the context. All in all, a touching and satisfying read.
A compelling coming-of-age tale set against the background of mid-20th-century rural New York and the burgeoning civil rights movement.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73275-450-8
Page Count: 268
Publisher: DayLew Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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 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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