For a rollicking tale of a thief who gets his just deserts, try Cynthia DeFelice’s Old Granny and the Bean Thief, or, for a...
Lee’s latest is disappointing all around.
Clarence is a little boy who lives in a town in the mountains and keeps to himself. His one avocation seems to be stealing cakes–the beautiful, decorated ones that his neighbors have made. The masked boy sneaks through kitchen windows to lift the covers off the cake stands and spirit away the creations he finds. But one day, instead of a confection, he finds an invitation to a party. The one caveat is that he must supply the cake. Clarence knows he cannot take a stolen cake, but he does not know how to cook. After much fretting, he discovers a cookbook that will fill in the gaps in his culinary know-how, and his cat helps him bake a beautiful cake. Unmasked, he attends the party amid much cheering, and now no longer needs to steal cakes, since “he had learned how to bake a cake for everyone to enjoy.” Never is it made apparent why Clarence steals cakes (he doesn’t admire or eat them), or why he shuns socializing with his neighbors. Without these background details, the ending falls flat, as the reader does not empathize with Clarence. Also, parents ought to be concerned by Lee’s failure to make clear to readers that stealing is wrong and carries penalties. Clarence never faces negative consequences for his stealing and is instead rewarded by a party and the offer of friendship with his neighbors. Lee’s bright, party-colored oil paintings are filled with bold, clear-lined basic shapes but are rather lackluster in substance. There’s too little there to keep the interest of readers who already find the story deficient, ultimately leaving more questions than it answers.
For a rollicking tale of a thief who gets his just deserts, try Cynthia DeFelice’s Old Granny and the Bean Thief, or, for a classic, no one does it better than Beatrix Potter and The Tale of Peter Rabbit.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-41968-392-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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