A box of her dead mother’s mementos arrives at Sam’s door, and the mystery surrounding the contents speaks to the chasm between mothers and daughters.
The novel opens as Sam drops baby Ella off at the sitter's for the first time after eight months of dedicated motherhood. It is the general consensus that she needs to get back to her pottery studio. She is fiercely attached to Ella, making up for the cool reserve of her mother Iris, whose own story focuses on the last few weeks of her life. Living contentedly alone in a condo in Florida, Iris, losing her life to cancer (it wasn’t much of a battle), reflects on the quiet moments she had with her own stoic mother, a farmer’s wife in Minnesota. In this multigenerational saga, that farmer's wife turns out to be Sam's grandmother Violet, a castaway on an orphan train, whose narrative centers the novel. A century ago, beautiful Lilibeth (the mother of Violet, who is the mother of Iris, who is the mother of Sam) dreamed of greater things and left her husband and Kentucky for New York, taking young Violet and little else. There, Lilibeth, who relies on the kindness of strange men, becomes a regular at Madame Tang’s opium den, and Violet adapts to the hardscrabble life of a tenement child on the Lower East Side. Violet’s New York is filthy and frightening, yet she loves the independence and the other tough kids she meets. Bound for the orphanage, Violet asks her mother to send her off on the orphan train instead. Operating for almost 80 years, the train brought destitute children to families in the Midwest, with varying results. Violet travels from town to town with the other children, parading on makeshift stages in the hope of being adopted. The wonder and strangeness of Violet’s journey is the highlight of the novel, and it lays the groundwork for a yearning, restrained relationship between Sam and Iris. A little girl boards New York’s orphan train at the turn of the 20th century and shapes generations to follow in this satisfying portrait of the many faces of motherhood.
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9383-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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