Witty, deft, and delightful, with a light touch in the tradition of Cold Comfort Farm.
A winning debut about a group of British friends who decide to drop out of the rat race and move to the country—with predictably disastrous results.
Emmy, Niall, and Sita are old pals who live in London and think of rural life largely in terms of wedding receptions at posh churches in picturesque villages. After one of these, they share cabs back to the train station for the ride home and arrive just in time to miss their train—which goes on to crash en route in one of most horrific railway disasters in decades. It looks like a sign, especially in light of the fact that Emmy has just inherited a manor house in Cornwall. So the three friends set off to make new lives for themselves in the country. Accompanying them are Sita’s husband Jonathan, her two children, Niall’s girlfriend Kat, and Emmy’s daughter Maya. They pool their funds to finance certain major repairs and settle down to daily life in what is, in effect, a yuppie commune. Naturally, there are problems. Nobody really likes Kat, who is American, dimwitted, and oversexed; even Niall breathes a sigh of relief when she returns to London. Emmy, who had an affair with Niall years ago and is still in love with him, finds their enforced intimacy hard to bear. Niall, for his part, is uncomfortably aware that people think Emmy’s daughter (who looks very much like him) is his. Sita becomes annoyed that Jonathan is spending so much of his time restoring an abandoned chapel nearby—in the company of an attractive young lady from the Historic Buildings Association. And Maya just wishes her mother would tell her who her father is. Whatever made these people think they could get on together? Just chalk it up to the naïveté of city folk.
Witty, deft, and delightful, with a light touch in the tradition of Cold Comfort Farm.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31041-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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