Despite menacing characters and real atrocities, this mystery deflates.
On a run through the early morning mists of Geneva, Abby Monroe watches in horror as a woman falls from a balcony to her death. Was she pushed?
Stunned, Abby’s eyes are drawn to a gorgeous jeweled bracelet just as a man, a man who could be a murderer, leans over the balcony, sees her and gives chase. Strangely, when Abby notifies the police, the body is nowhere to be found. So, Abby puts the mysterious event behind her and continues on to Peshawar, Pakistan, to document vaccine statistics for the United Nations. Her sleep is filled with nightmares, and her bathroom crawls with cockroaches, yet Abby pulls herself together and begins to work with women and children desolated by natural and human disasters. Gately (Lipstick in Afghanistan, 2010) vividly depicts the appalling conditions of refugee camps, as well as the stories of women who have escaped sexual slavery, yet her heroine’s naïveté strains credulity. Despite having been dumped by her long-term boyfriend, lost a dream job and willingly accepted a job in a place even the U.N. euphemistically terms an unstable security situation (not to mention having witnessed a possible murder), Abby implicitly trusts everyone she meets. Her days are quickly populated by the refugees, Hana (the surly maid whose husband sold their child) and Najeela (the administrative assistant who wants to marry Lars, not an Afghan man chosen by her family). Into this world of women struggling to negotiate a world of terrorism and social oppression, Nick Sinclair arrives. Investigating conditions at the camps and allegations of human trafficking, Nick wants to interview Abby for a sidebar story. Although she inexplicably distrusts Nick, Abby has no one else to turn to when she finds the bracelet.
Despite menacing characters and real atrocities, this mystery deflates.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6912-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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