A potentially gripping tale undermined by its frustrating heroine.
A young lawyer neglects her friends and family as she stubbornly tries to help a sex trafficking victim in Carr’s (The Vernazza Effect, 2013) second novel.
Attorney Tara Collins unexpectedly receives a large sum of money as a gift from her newly married best friend Ella. With it, she decides to create a nonprofit foundation within her San Francisco law firm to help those who can’t afford legal aid. Its board is made up of Assistant District Attorney Brett, who happens to be Tara’s secret boyfriend; social worker Chad; and journalist Jordan (who bizarrely reports on both the law firm and the foundation, in a seemingly textbook case of conflict of interest). For the foundation’s fourth case, she convinces the board members to take on Ashlee, a young teen who was found beaten and left for dead in an alley. Ashlee is too frightened to talk, so Tara begins spending nights with her in the hospital and playing private detective in between visits. Her actions begin to concern Brett and her other colleagues, who insist that she involve the police. Some readers will admire the go-it-alone bravado of the workaholic, emotional Tara. Others, however, may be less impressed by her lack of sense as she jeopardizes her relationships as well as the personal safety of everyone around her. She also undermines her chances of putting away a very bad man due to her dogged insistence on solving the case alone. On the surface, it’s a noble cause, but it may become difficult for readers to applaud her as she continues to take misstep after misstep. (Relief comes, however, when the narrative focuses on Alexander, Ashlee’s high-flying pimp.) The novel’s opening and closing chapters are also lengthy and uninspired. However, patient readers may still find a compelling story about surviving forced prostitution here.
A potentially gripping tale undermined by its frustrating heroine.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692201022
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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