An appealing work that combines YA-style tropes with college-age struggles.
A young woman unravels a family secret with her 12-year-old sister’s help in Falk’s debut novel.
Twenty-two-year-old Abigail Hartley is living at home with her parents in New York City, and her deadline to either enroll in college classes or move out is fast approaching. The cerebral young woman is indecisive about her next step: “I’m a yellow blip on a black screen and the ten-year-old controlling me is still learning how to play.” The sudden death of her estranged maternal grandmother spurs a desire to look into her shadowy family history. Abigail’s mom refuses to explain why they won’t be going to the funeral, and the young woman realizes that there may be only way for her to uncover what’s really going on: She’ll have to visit her mother’s Georgia hometown. In order to make the trip without her parents’ knowledge, she needs a plan, and she enlists her little sister Maddy’s assistance. Despite their age difference, they have a close and endearingly humorous relationship—one that that forms the emotional heart of Falk’s story. Take Abigail’s observation after the two log some significant bonding time: “ ‘Whoa. T.M.I., Mom.’ I just used a Maddy-ism. We’ve spent so much time together, I think I’ve absorbed her brain—it was small, and delicious.” The sisters’ search eventually leads Abigail to discover some troubled Southern history. Overall, this is a well-paced story that, despite its familiar structure, feels less like a bildungsroman than it does a feel-good fairy tale for young-adult readers. It’s to the book’s credit that it brings to light a particular facet of the history of racism in Georgia, where the majority of the book is set. It’s also revealing that it took such a journey for Abigail, a white character, to learn about racism’s effects on her own family: “racism is far from gone. It may not always be as obvious now as outlawed love or segregated schools, but it’s there.”
An appealing work that combines YA-style tropes with college-age struggles.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-988276-23-6
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Peasantry Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 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
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