A meandering and sometimes-twisted tale of uphill battles and unexpected determination.
A destitute middle-aged woman claws her way back from financial and emotional devastation.
This final installment of a trilogy follows the ill-fated Hester Randal as she struggles to cope with the many disappointments of her past. When the novel opens, Hester is living in an abandoned trailer park, still smarting about the husband who cheated on her and the baby she effectively abandoned. Her main goal is to devise a way to return from Florida to the baby she left behind in New Jersey with her father, Jimmy Raymer, and his new wife, Cecilia. Unfortunately, Hester has no money to her name, and no means of traveling to New Jersey. Despite the promises that the couple made to her about sending progress reports on baby Pearl, they have failed to respond to any of Hester’s calls, or communicate in any manner whatsoever. Hester grows increasingly concerned about her child, and she finally resolves to start making changes. To her great relief, she lands a job as a waitress at a local diner, a position she considers beneath her, but is thankful to have secured after the scandals of her past (“She was focused on making money, and the Woolbright Diner was the place where this had a chance of happening”). Hester begins to adjust her self-image, determining that nothing will stop her from returning to her daughter. She also starts developing a relationship with a kind and handsome man who lives nearby, giving readers hope that she might yet create a satisfying life for herself. Told in the same accessible prose as the previous books of the trilogy (On the Edge of Dangerous Things, 2013; In an Awful Way, 2014), the finale wraps up many loose ends. But the narrative has a slower pace, with too much of the book devoted to rehashing the events from prior installments. Even so, Snyder-Carroll (Click…Kill, 2015, etc.) holds the reader’s interest by continuing to introduce new complications, including natural disasters and run-ins with old foes. The second half of the gritty novel moves more quickly than the first part, as many old plotlines alter their previous courses.
A meandering and sometimes-twisted tale of uphill battles and unexpected determination.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5174-3151-8
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2017
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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