A pleasant diversion, especially for animal lovers.
Quotidian doings at a rural English veterinary practice.
In this second in a series, Shaw (A Country Affair, 2006) details the continuing administrative woes of the Barleybridge Animal Hospital. Newcomer vet Dan is nettling the female personnel. He replaced the much handsomer Scott as a temporary staff doctor and is a dour party-pooper. Joy, the office manager, and Letty, a partner’s wife, are determined not to see Dan’s position made permanent, even though he’s a former equine vet to a sheik. Receptionist Kate, who hopes to attend veterinary college, warms to Dan once she accompanies him on some farm calls and witnesses his stall-side manner. Suspense here is of the “it might happen . . . then it does!” variety. Dan annoys Lord Askew, the local aristocrat, and loses his business by castigating his lordship for delaying a cow’s treatment. But Dan diagnoses the congenital foot defect of a roan belonging to Askew’s spoiled daughter, Mary. Thus, Dan might not only win back the bovine practice, but wrest Askew’s equine practice away from Barleybridge’s competition. And he does! Much of the story unfolds from Dan’s perspective, yet the exact nature of his pivotal breakup with his American inamorata is withheld until the end. His flirtation with Lady Mary is left dangling, as is the growing affinity between him and Kate as they deliver adorable lambs. When Kate’s father dies suddenly, Kate’s mother, Tessa, a solicitor who abandoned her to her father and second wife Mia, resurfaces after 19 years and offers to secure her daughter’s education and financial future. But Tessa’s overweening narcissism prompts Kate to consider renewing their estrangement. The rustic charm is jarred by animal cruelty (cat fanciers, be forewarned), but justice prevails, thanks to the vigilance of the Barleybridge staff. Shaw’s men are either calmly heroic or crustily lovable, and the women either harridans or surrendered wives, morphing on occasion from one extreme to the other in a single visit to the beauty parlor.
A pleasant diversion, especially for animal lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9821-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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