The element of mystery is unfortunately never developed here, but the romance is subtly handled, and the book is charming in...
English romance author Summers (Monday’s Child, not reviewed, etc.) fashions a pretty, triangulated saga around a young woman’s inheritance of a country cottage.
When Jasmine Wyatt’s employer Giles Devenish dies, inexplicably bequeathing to this 20-year-old secretary an overgrown cottage in the village of Horton, Jasmine leaps at the chance to escape the confines of her stuffy home in Bristol. Her mother having died in childbirth, Jasmine has been raised by her overbearing, censorious father, Owen, and her kindly, conventional older sister, Grace, as they work the family haberdashery shop in Bristol. Head-strong, impetuous Jasmine and her father lock horns constantly. The cottage, it turns out, is charmingly rustic, though bearing a curse since the previous tenants died in the house after eating poisoned mushrooms; moreover, someone has thrown red paint over the front door, as if to scare the new visitors. The fright is mitigated by the kindness of the estate agent, William Hedges, who shows Jasmine around the place. William, an attractive bachelor, gets Jasmine’s blood up when he takes jabs at her high-heeled city shoes and urbane condescension. William’s unmarried aunt, Mrs. Lester, is just about Owen’s age, and when Owen is persuaded to come stay in the cottage for health reasons, he finds he rather likes the elderly socials and country ways of the villagers. Back at the Bristol shop, Grace, shockingly, has been romancing the family doctor and plans to marry him and settle in Scotland, while Owen, who swore he would never get over his dear departed wife, is moving in on Mrs. Lester. It’s only fair in the end to offer our feisty heroine a chance to set down roots as well, and it happens in the form of a proffered job at the local day-care center and some heavy hints from William.
The element of mystery is unfortunately never developed here, but the romance is subtly handled, and the book is charming in its simplicity and clarity of plot.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6411-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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