A disturbing but resonant depiction of spousal abuse.
Monroe tells of one woman’s struggles with domestic abuse in this debut novel.
In Toronto, on Ruby’s 16th birthday in 1955, she meets her future husband, Jason, during a nighttime cruise on Lake Ontario. He convinces her to have sex early in their courtship. She gets pregnant and marries Jason despite her misgivings; he’s 19 and she’s 16. Jason’s aggressive behavior quickly becomes more emotionally and physically abusive. Jason makes sexual advances on her younger sister and openly cheats on her; eventually, he starts beating and raping her. Over 20 years of marriage, during which they have two children, she does her best to try to keep Jason happy in the desperate hope that he’ll treat her better. Ruby succeeds at her corporate job at an envelope manufacturing company; eventually, she secretly takes lovers and plans her escape from her husband. Everything has to be done quietly, due to Jason’s repeated threats to murder her and their children, but she knows that leaving him is the only way to salvage her dignity. Monroe writes in a simple, declarative prose that’s synced to Ruby’s inner monologue: “Ruby’s heart skipped a beat when she saw the moving van pull into the driveway. She worried, What if Jason plans to return home and catch me in the act of moving? My stomach’s in knots.” The plot creeps along, building slowly, as in a work of horror fiction, although the subtitle, “Inspired by True Events,” along with the fact that the author and her protagonist share the same name, lends a chilling plausibility to the tale. The dialogue is a bit wooden, but Ruby’s agency in her professional life and in her eventual flight make her a dynamic protagonist. The author succeeds in depicting the codependent mindset that keeps Ruby with Jason, as well as the awakening that finally allowed her to realize the extreme danger of her situation.
A disturbing but resonant depiction of spousal abuse.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-1566-0
Page Count: 172
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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