by Rita Welty Bourke ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2016
An affecting portrayal of the making of a veterinarian and the day-to-day challenges she faces.
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In Bourke’s debut novel, a young veterinarian is inspired and sometimes tortured by her intense empathy with the animals she treats.
Kylie Wheeler’s route to a career in veterinary medicine begins with an after-college job with the National Park Service observing and protecting endangered species of shorebirds on the New Jersey coast. From there, she travels to the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana to work on a National Forest Service project to investigate the feasibility of reintroducing the Canadian lynx to the environment. In both of these jobs, Kylie faces frustrations and rewards as she learns about the unique qualities of the birds and rabbits she studies as well as the human ignorance and indifference that so often contribute to animal suffering. Discouraged by the futility of keeping picnickers from trampling rare plover eggs and alienated by scientific research that requires the deaths of its subjects, Kylie goes back to school to become a vet. She finds that even the healing of sick and injured animals is complicated by money, professional egos, and human error. Bourke does an excellent job of animating Kylie—a cynical but warm and hardworking young woman who is quick to admit and relinquish her prejudices and cares deeply about the animals in her care even when she is supposed to affect professional detachment. The novel is engagingly written and never drags or dithers. The quick changes of scene can sometimes feel a bit disjointed, but Bourke moves Kylie through her interesting careers with skill, maintaining reader interest and allowing her character to grow and develop through her widely varied experiences with animals. As a vet, Kylie articulates the particular pain of a caring medical professional treating creatures who are under the control of owners who may not value their lives or feelings very highly.
An affecting portrayal of the making of a veterinarian and the day-to-day challenges she faces.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9964201-0-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Lansinger Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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