A lovable lead character and the hint of mystery make this trip down Memory Lane pleasurable enough to leave readers...
In the first young-adult novel in a projected series, Lopez documents the life and loves of Hermie Brambleweed, a teenager dealing with typical high school drama—and some big secrets.
In this slightly dated coming-of-age story, Lopez introduces the world to Hermie. He’s an amazingly self-sufficient kid who proves to be a classic teenage boy in many respects: He hates his job, spends most of his time hanging out with friends, gets drunk on the sly and sneaks into his girlfriend Jane’s room as often as possible. But Hermie is keeping secrets. His father is dead, his mother is missing, and Hermie lives alone in a big house with a large trust fund administered by his grandparents. He is also guarding a cache of documents hidden in the basement by his meticulous father—files that could land a large chemical company in big trouble. Despite these secrets and the potential pitfalls of autonomy, Hermie flies under the radar by maintaining a job, studying hard, keeping house and living responsibly. As the story moves chronologically through Hermie’s sophomore and junior years, Lopez keeps the focus on Hermie’s passions (bowling and Jane) while entertaining readers with the antics of Hermie and his friends. There’s potential for great tension in Hermie’s story, but Lopez, alluding to the threat of discovery and danger, misses the opportunity to build suspense by focusing on Hermie’s daily routine rather than his tantalizing secrets. Although the cast of characters is strong, the dialogue feels forced at times, possibly the result of a confused timeline. Lopez doesn’t set the narrative in a specific year, but terms such as “cats” and “chicks” call to mind a bygone era, and he peppers the dialogue with references to cassette tapes and answering machines rather than iPods and cellphones. However, issues relating to sex and drugs remain relevant to modern teenagers, and Lopez addresses them in a tactful, realistic fashion.
A lovable lead character and the hint of mystery make this trip down Memory Lane pleasurable enough to leave readers anticipating the next chapter.Pub Date: March 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466406520
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
