Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.
A serene, beautiful debut that brings together a busted-up rodeo rider and a teenaged ex-con who help each other heal at a family ranch in the Wild Canadian West.
Joe Willie Wolfchild has been a champion rodeo rider since childhood, but his ride on the infamous bull See Four leaves him so battered and maimed that he is forced to retire. He retreats to his Ojibway grandparents’ Wolf Creek ranch, where he is nursed by his Sioux mother, Johanna. Meanwhile, in a bleak suburb, 15-year-old Aiden Hartley drifts into a dangerous life of gangs, drugs and robbery, spurred by the trauma of seeing his black mother, Claire, beaten up by her white boyfriend. Aiden winds up in jail for two years, during which Claire extricates herself from the abusive boyfriend and starts a new life. When Aiden finishes doing his time, a sympathetic youth detective arranges a recuperative stay for him at Wolf Creek. Closed up within himself, Joe Willie is absorbed in trying to fix an old family truck given to him by his father, while Aiden is cocky and hostile. These two stubborn, wounded souls circle each other warily, drawn closer by Aiden’s startling natural propensity for riding. They come to an agreement: The boy will help Joe Willie fix his truck, and in return, the older man will teach him how to ride a bull—but not until Aiden becomes hardened by cowboy life, which includes punishing hikes up Iron Mountain and an encounter with a bear. And Johanna helps Claire restore her relationship with her son by sharing the healing ways of the Sioux. Wagamese, himself an Ojibway from northwestern Ontario, delineates with skill and dignity these stoical lives shaped by the land of their ancestors.
Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35926-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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