by Rafael Rivera ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2016
Despite occasionally florid prose, Rivera's debut is a tightly-woven narrative with vivid settings and characters.
In the American South, a young woman struggles to overcome poverty and abuse and make a better life.
For Rose McDonald, life in Orangeburg, South Carolina, is marked by a vicious cycle of tragedy and poverty. Her story begins in the late ‘50s with her mother, Wilma, a sweet-natured, sixteen-year-old daughter of a moonshiner of Cherokee descent. While visiting a bar with her best friend, she meets a Marine named Joe McCloud. Wilma is afraid of what Joe might think if he discovers she’s poor. Although Joe comes from a wealthy family, he’s estranged from his haughty mother and chose not to follow his brother, Calhoun, into high society. They marry when Wilma becomes pregnant; Joe reenlists in the Marines and is sent to Vietnam. Rose is born while he’s in training and Calhoun steps in to help the young family. Wilma’s devastated when Joe’s killed in action in Vietnam. Lonely, she begins a relationship with Bubba, an abusive drunk. Meanwhile, Rose grows closer to her grandparents, but she cannot escape Bubba’s unsavory attentions, which culminate in a horrific attack. Determined to overcome the cycle of poverty and abuse that marked Wilma’s life, Rose attends college and becomes a police officer, a career choice that leads to a reckoning with her past. Although the novel takes its name from the titular character, Rose McDonald, it really has two protagonists, Rose and her mother, Wilma. The first half of the novel is devoted to Wilma’s story and the circumstances of Rose’s birth. Rose’s harrowing but ultimately redemptive journey is followed in the second half. This ambitious structure is well-executed thanks to Rivera’s carefully paced narrative. The memorable leads are surrounded by a memorable cast of supporting characters including Joe and Calhoun McCloud; men whose love for Wilma and Rose help shape their destinies. For all its successes, the novel needed restraint in the euphemism department during the sex scenes. During one scene, the male anatomy is described as a “log”, “flagpole”, and “bratwurst.”
Despite occasionally florid prose, Rivera's debut is a tightly-woven narrative with vivid settings and characters.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5236-0538-5
Page Count: 362
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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