This playful fantasy deftly argues that teens can only benefit by widening their perspectives.
This debut YA novel stars a heroine who leaves home to answer the call of a distant mountain peak.
In the land of Mirth, in the town of Slatfoot, 17-year-old Topaz has “long, bone white hair…chalky skin, and the palest of features.” She lives in a tree and tends to her strog, a helplessly rotund creature that lives in her backyard and generates gravel. This is her Fate, as read on her fingernails by an ayp named Murx, an ancient, towering being. (Ayps “walked on their fore-knuckles in a lumbering manner, but could become agile and swift when they had to fight.”) The strog depresses Topaz, but she also notices a “haunting glumness” in the rest of Slatfoot’s people, despite their smiles. One morning, she spies a “claw of light” on the distant mountain peak. She then feels a sharp pain in her stomach. Her “umbi-pit” (or bellybutton) swallows her limb-by-limb. The dull, washed-out Mirth is replaced by a land of flowers and greenery. After waking up back in Mirth, she prepares to head east toward the mountain peak. On her journey, she meets Uniz, a boy with a horn on his head whom she comes to rely on. He possesses a powerful stone coin that once belonged to Murx. Eventually, Topaz learns that she’s been chosen to liberate those with Fates determined by Murx. Despite the cute wordplay (“Snazzlepops!”), Tremblay’s offbeat fantasy is aimed at older teens. “The Truth Portal,” part one, constitutes more than half of the narrative, and “The Color Mayhem,” part two, picks up about a year later. While both sections are reminiscent of a Roald Dahl classic—The BFG, for example—the second reads like a parable. In it, the Slatfooters battle Mirth’s drab surroundings by adopting colors, then joining “color coteries,” such as the Red Specks and the White Stars. They grow obsessed with “out-coloring” one another and sipping “buish,” which causes giggling and daydreaming. These elements speak to the millennial (and even younger) generations’ preoccupation with identity politics and marijuana, both of which can be ruinous in excess. Topaz’s connection to her “grandmamâ” Seraphine shows that individuals always have the potential to keep growing.
This playful fantasy deftly argues that teens can only benefit by widening their perspectives.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9690172-0-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: GrindSpark Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2019
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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