by Robert J. Conley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2001
For fans of the genre and of Robert J. Conley only.
An eventful tale of a renegade Chickamuga Indian’s resistance to tribal oppression and the US government’s oppression of Native American populations, from the prolific Cherokee author (The Cherokee Dragon, 2000, etc.), a three-time Spur winner.
We first meet Conley’s biracial (eponymous) protagonist as he fights a nearly fatal battle with a warrior from the Osage tribe, with whom Jack’s people (though not he himself) had made a truce. The story thereafter offers brief glimpses of Jack’s violent past, while concentrating on a melodramatic—as well as contrived and heavily coincidental—series of encounters and adventures. These latter, which fill Jack’s days of wandering throughout the postbellum Southeast and near Midwest (as “an outlaw in the Cherokee nation”), include his exploits as horse-trader and -thief, an unlucky meeting with three larcenous cavalry soldiers, a brief period of peace with a compassionate westering family (the Upbates), who are subsequently victimized by the murderous Peek Eder gang, and a climactic settling of old scores. At the close, Jack earns both employment as an army scout and a formal pardon, enabling him to head “home” to Arkansas—having first become educated to the numerous errors of his ways (“I have become as bloody a monster as they,” Conley actually allows him to declare—referring to his foes) and lectured us on the need for racial and ethnic harmony. Spanish Jack is actually closer, in substance and style, to the western historical novels of Douglas C. Jones than it is to the work of other Native American authors (such as Louise Erdrich and James Welch) to which Conley’s books are frequently—and to their detriment—compared. As an example of action narrative, it’s more than competent, and sometimes genuinely exciting. As serious fiction, it’s flat, formulaic, and egregiously preachy.
For fans of the genre and of Robert J. Conley only.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26231-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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 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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