Jack and Andrew make a compelling duo powering this engrossing if despairing small-town series about oppression, freedom and...
A fiery tale of emerging diversity in backwoods Georgia and the challenges of countering religious intolerance.
Jack Miller is a handsome, popular high school football star in Sweet, Georgia. At 18, he’s been harboring a secret he can no longer hide, even if it threatens to deeply infuriate his large, ultraconservative family. As the son of a staunchly homophobic, conservative pastor, he’s just waiting for high school graduation and the call of freedom found in his attending a state university. Enter Andrew Collins, a thin, scruffy high school senior whose parents hurriedly relocated the family from Atlanta to Sweet, figuring a change of scenery (coupled with some extreme aversion tactics) would cleanse their son of his homosexual yearnings. Upon meeting, the boys’ instant attraction fuels a forbidden passion that blossoms into a clandestine relationship. After another schoolmate frustratingly comes out to Jack, a major misstep exposes Jack’s sexuality and incites the wrath of his father. Through it all, Jack remains protective of his flamboyant little brother, Billy, who he fears is also gay and may be left in the hands of his maniacal father upon Jack’s graduation. York paints the town of Sweet as a bastion of God-fearing homophobes ruled by a church and its dictatorial leader; only Jack’s mother seems to have a more lenient take on the subject, and the true nature of her relationship with her husband is only revealed at the story’s greatly unresolved conclusion. Certain sections are difficult to read and somewhat implausible: Minister Nate’s sheer, overblown hatred for Jack is matched only by Andrew’s bizarre acceptance of his family’s starvation torture. While the author effectively touches on child abuse issues alongside the struggles of young gay men coming to terms with their sexuality in the face of religious adversity, this first novel in York’s (In Or Out?, 2013, etc.) A Southern Thing series is blunted by an overly abrupt, violent conclusion and explicit sex scenes, which may limit the novel’s overall appeal and reading audience. Still, for those interested in the often forcibly suppressed vitality of young gay teens, York, a prolific Southern writer, delivers a hardscrabble yarn of forbidden love against all odds.
Jack and Andrew make a compelling duo powering this engrossing if despairing small-town series about oppression, freedom and equality.Pub Date: March 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496133571
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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