by S.E. Valenti ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2015
A robust tale of violence and vendettas.
A family saga of betrayal, brutality, and Sicilian honor.
Sicily in the spring of 1911 is a dangerous place and time for the Vazanno family, the prime players in this debut novel. “Get the horses. I’ll get the shotguns!” Sevario Vazanno shouts when he and Santo Padua see smoke coming from the farm owned by Sevario’s brother Giuseppe. Discovering that Giuseppe and his wife are missing and their animals are burned to death, Sevario is relieved to discover the couple’s two daughters, Adriana, 16, and her little sister, Francesca, hiding in a tunnel below the family’s property. But the joy of finding the sisters is soon shattered when Sevario discovers the body of his other brother, Gaspano, shot to death on his nearby farm. Who committed these heinous crimes is a puzzle, and Adriana silently holds the key. The story flashes back several months to her rape by Turiddu Vanucci, son of her father’s dear friend Vito. She keeps the act a secret from nearly everyone—especially her father, Giuseppe. But when his wife, Maria, discovers who violated their daughter, she engages her son in a vendetta. “It has to be you, Antonio,” she tells him. Antonio, who is studying for the priesthood, is horrified by his mother’s unholy request, but his omertà “culture demanded it…and he knew he had to accept it.” Valenti excels in providing her characters with seemingly insurmountable situations, plenty of action, and rich dialogue. There is, however, an overabundance of characters, and the inclusion of a family tree would have been helpful. For example, it is confusing as to who Santo Padua is: on the first page, he is identified as Sevario’s brother, but later, Sevario’s niece Adriana and Santa “were not natural siblings, as he had been adopted.” Also, too often characters cry or feel tears coming to their eyes—not that the Vazannos don’t have reason to wail with all the drama they encounter.
A robust tale of violence and vendettas.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63393-106-0
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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