A dark, stirring novel with a riveting final twist whose implications linger well after the last page.
A mystery about the cascading consequences of childhood trauma, as seen through the eyes of a young prison inmate.
De Smet makes an impressive debut with this haunting psychological thriller that captivates from the get-go. It’s a journey through the repressed memories of Emily Quinn, a young woman sitting in the San Francisco County lock-up in 1966 after her arrest for her father’s slaying. She remembers nothing of the incident and practically nothing about the rest of her past. Enter Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist hired by her defense team to discover any potentially mitigating circumstances that they can use at trial. Lieberman’s personal mission, however, is to help Emily find the many missing pieces of a life that culminated in a brutal murder and to convince her that she can still have a meaningful future. When they meet, Emily hesitantly tells him the information she’s gathered about herself: her name is Emily, she’s 19 years old, and she has a mother and a brother who haven’t visited her; a twin sister, Penelope, who died when they were both 5; and a fiance, Reid, a U.S. Marine in boot camp. Using hypnosis, Lieberman brings her mind back to the age of 8 and then moves her steadily forward in each of their weekly sessions. Gradually, Emily dredges up details of her father’s abusive behavior and her mother’s pathological disengagement. What emerges is a story of a family filled with secrets and dysfunction. De Smet’s skillful use of first-person perspective, both in the prison environment and during Emily’s recollections, brings readers right into the moment; past and present events have equal immediacy. The setting is the 1950s and ’60s, and the author provides just enough cultural references—movie and song titles, clothing styles—to realistically render the period. Fluent prose and dialogue propel the action, although some of Emily’s mental meanderings during relatively ordinary events feel overly dramatic; her tortuous internal battle between the forces of light and dark, especially, goes on a bit too long. This is a small complaint, however, given the complexity of Emily’s path to self-discovery.
A dark, stirring novel with a riveting final twist whose implications linger well after the last page.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965276-0-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Greenly Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2016
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
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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