by Robert Leslie Fisher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2015
An ambitious novel that falls short of its lofty goals.
Smarting from the wound of her husband’s desertion, a young professional architect nevertheless tries to win him back in Fisher’s (Vanilla Republic, 2009, etc.) novel.
New Yorker Justine Rosenstein is not one to give up easily. The Riviera Maya might not quite qualify as the ends of the Earth, but she is ready to travel there to track down her husband, a Belarusian named Sergey Tchigorin. Never mind that she hears about his whereabouts from a mysterious woman, Jessica Mayfield; Justine is convinced she can work her charms on her husband all over again and make him see the error of his ways. But it’s complicated. Considering how he vanished right after his dissertation adviser at Columbia was shot dead, Sergey’s disappearance from New York could not have been more poorly timed, and the cops have been hot on his trail. Mom is also worried about Justine visiting Mexico alone, so she sets her up with a travel companion, fellow middle-school teacher Richard Furman. Hints at a possible liaison between the assassinated professor and secret Iranian agents set the story off to a promising start. Unfortunately, the waters are muddied further by increasingly implausible plotlines involving Mexico’s war on drugs, Iranian subterfuge, a wily North Carolina stockbroker-turned–church leader named Bobby the Banker, and even Afghanistan’s Haqqani network. Characters all come with tremendous baggage, which weighs the novel down even as the story careens out of control to its surprise ending. It’s also difficult to buy into the characters’ motivations. Sure, Furman feels he is repaying a debt of gratitude to Justine’s mom by being her daughter’s travel companion, and yes, he is attracted to Justine, but that still doesn’t explain his heavy emotional (and financial) investment. Numerous misplaced punctuation marks throughout are an added distraction. While many established structural elements—changes in narrative perspective, parallel plotlines, elements of suspense—are in place, they aren’t corralled into a disciplined whole. The sights and many delicious foods of Mexico are sadly not enough to salvage a confused story.
An ambitious novel that falls short of its lofty goals.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Robert Leslie Fisher
BOOK REVIEW
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
37
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.