A tale of kindhearted, hesitant heroism, with a little vigilante justice.
Ellen and her blind best friend, Temerity, again take on the wrongs of this world, letting neither emotional scarring nor physical disability stand in their way.
Ellen Homes is beginning to recover from the traumas of her upbringing within the dark underbelly of the foster-care system. Shattuck (Invisible Ellen, 2014) picks up the threads of Ellen’s tale with her second novel, exploring how Ellen’s friends and the universe conspire to pull her out of the shadows and into the light of social relationships. A horrific bus crash sets in motion a constellation of new crises for Ellen to reluctantly resolve. The crash forces Ellen into contact with not only a young girl (who will avoid struggles with the foster-care system, thanks to Ellen), but also a Detective Barclay, who could prove helpful, if only Ellen would bring herself to speak openly with him. Further, one of Ellen’s co-workers is likely selling drugs, another has discovered neither she nor her girlfriend can conceive a child, and a runaway with a bone-shaking cough has taken shelter in the basement of Temerity and Justice’s apartment building. Perhaps most frightening of all, Temerity’s friend Rupert seems to have asked Ellen out on a date. The prose is still heavy, like the weight of Ellen’s past burdens; we are reminded repeatedly that Ellen tries hard to stay invisible, that Ellen knows how kids get ensnared within the system, that Ellen uses food to comfort her roiling emotions, that Ellen finds social interactions exhausting. Yet the more Ellen is drawn out of her own head, the more the twists and turns of her life drive energy into the tale. Ellen turns her skill at seeming invisible to good use, bringing to light what others want hidden.
A tale of kindhearted, hesitant heroism, with a little vigilante justice.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16762-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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