by Richard H. Grabmeier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 14, 2000
A strong, debut historical novel.
A Swedish boy makes good in the New World in this rags-to-riches story.
Peter Olaf Hokanson, a 17-year-old Swede, is obsessed with America and the possibilities presented by the faraway country. Unwilling to labor in his father’s woodworking shop for the rest of his life, our hero leaves his family and girlfriend in order to make a new life in the United States. After a long journey alone across the Atlantic and a train trip from New York, Peter arrives in Minnesota in 1895, where he finds an untamed, frozen landscape covered in forests. The lumber industry is booming and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are quickly developing. With the help of his already established cousin, Sven, and a new friend, Gus, Peter quickly finds his first job as a lumberjack, which kicks off his astonishing ten year evolution from poor immigrant laborer to lumber company executive to wealthy and prestigious factory owner. Yet this path toward success does not come easily—each chapter in the novel includes a particular challenge that Peter must overcome, whether it’s almost freezing to death after fighting off a pack of wolves on Christmas day, dealing with the tragic death of a loved one, overcoming lost love, or facing an assault with a deadly weapon charge. This steady stream of obstacles teaches Peter that, in the tradition of Horatio Alger, hard work, determination and loyalty lead to wealth and happiness. For the reader, these tests keep the pages flowing and the story moving forward at a good pace. Additionally, the novel is peppered with Peter’s love affairs with very different women—a Swedish sweetheart, a half-Indian healer and his boss’ daughters—that function to keep his story interesting. Grabmeier clearly has done his homework in terms of the lumber industry’s history in Minnesota and its effect on the state’s growth, and he should be applauded for weaving insightful historical facts into the book without drowning the narrative in them. While Peter’s trial skirts bombast, overall the book offers a nice twist on the typical immigrant-makes-good-in America storyline.
A strong, debut historical novel.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2000
ISBN: 978-0595157440
Page Count: 480
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2010
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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