by Robert Flynn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001
Prose throughout smelling of tallow and coal oil. Flynn (Living with Hyenas, 1995) deserves a prize.
Life on a Texas ranch, portrayed by Flynn with hard-earned western wit and matchless skill.
Back in 1910, Claris McCloud gets his ranch together but will soon need a son to help keep the place fit. “Claris considered going to Fort Worth and marrying a whore. They had a work ethic and when you married one you knew what you were getting.” Instead, he weds skittish virgin Celestine, 23, “scant and quiet as a whisper in a wind storm,” whom he must rape to get pregnant. She bears Clarista: all rawhide, fast to the saddle, born to herd and rope. When Claris dies, Rista takes over the ranch and finds herself courted by two men. She passes over rakish poet/newspaper editor Stoddard to marry feisty lawman Odis, who gives up his badge and becomes a fair ranch-hand. But daughter Cassie is too hotheaded to stick around the ranch after she gets pregnant; her mind tossing wildly with Hollywood dreams, Cassie takes off. Who fathered baby Chance? Well, even grown-up Chance wonders when he gets an anonymous call telling him that Grandmother Rista is dying and needs his help. Raised by Cassie to be a bow-tie gentleman, his whole childhood spent in front of the tube while Mom ran around, Chance is now a vastly smart, materialistic TV station manager in Florida who’s never ridden a horse in his life. He’s just buried Cassie when he has to go to the ranch and perhaps warehouse his grandmother in a nursing home. Rista has had her share of tragedy since her daughter took off; she shot Odin and later shot the man who may have fathered Cassie’s child. All grizzle and gristle, the old lady deals her grandson some life-lessons in blood and entrails unlike anything he’s seen on TV.
Prose throughout smelling of tallow and coal oil. Flynn (Living with Hyenas, 1995) deserves a prize.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87565-244-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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by Robert Flynn ; developed by JoSara MeDia
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by Robert Flynn
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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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