Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.
A terrorist sleeper agent has fallen in love with his adoptive country, but the arrival of other jihadists threatens to place him back on a dangerous path.
Two Pakistani jihadists are on a collision course in America’s Heartland. One is Yussef, a graduate student and the lone member of a three-year-old terrorist cell in Rockledge, Mo. The second is Jamal, who, accompanied by three other Islamic extremists, has only recently left Pakistan, hoping to infiltrate the United States through Mexico and then meet up with Yussef in order to launch an attack. Yussef’s time in America has changed him however, and the friendships he has made there, along with the affections of his modest, beautiful classmate Rachael, have turned him against the mission—an inopportune problem with the determined Jamal on his way. Elliott’s debut novel is surprisingly complex, never oversimplifying the shades of gray in which it operates; there is no demonizing Islam or holding America up as a guiltless victim—just people making good and bad decisions, either because of tragedies in their pasts or the personalities of those around them. The muted tension of Jamal’s inevitable arrival is magnified by the novel’s ability to endear itself through Yussef’s lighthearted moments, ultimately making the threat of losing them all the more heartbreaking. Character interaction is sometimes weak; inner monologue is where the story is most comfortable, one-on-one conversations between characters (particularly Yussef and Rachael) are strong, but anything more and the book’s dialogue becomes jumbled and cliché. A thriller at its core, a subplot involving the captain of the ship on which Jamal and his fellow jihadists were smuggled across the ocean supplies a little action until the novel’s final, violent crescendo.
Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0984600403
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Rising River
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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