An engaging, modern-day Faust for brainy rockers.
In Eggenberger’s debut novel, an aging heavy-metal music fan and aspiring writer sells her soul to the devil and finds there’s a lot more to life than good and evil.
The novel’s unnamed, Scandinavian narrator has long enjoyed the freedom of being an unattached, self-described “nympho slut” and “metalhead.” However, she struggles to find time to write between shifts at her day job, and as she approaches her 47th birthday, she begins to worry that her writing career may never take off the way she’d planned and that her steady stream of young one-night stands may soon dry up. One day, as she steals a few hours to write in a Copenhagen coffee shop, a dead ringer for her favorite metal musician approaches her. She recognizes him, not as the rock icon he resembles, but as the devil himself. He offers her the promise of the writing career—and love life—she’s always dreamed of in exchange for her soul, but she’s reluctant. The devil is not accustomed to hearing “no,” and so he instead persuades her to help him destroy his wife, the biblical Lilith, before she destroys the world. As the tough-as-nails narrator’s sultry romance with the devil begins and her writing career skyrockets toward celebrity status, she finds that the real world is a lot more nuanced than the one purported by so-called moralists. The novel has distinct, well-developed feminist undertones and proves to be about much more than a powerful woman destroying another powerful woman. Fans of the long-esteemed feminist heroine Lilith may be disappointed to see her as the villain here, but she proves to be an antagonist of Maleficent-esque proportions, and readers may be torn between fearing and loving her character. Feminist readers may also be pleased to see that the tomboy narrator ultimately finds camaraderie with a well-researched group of legendary women, including the Norse goddess, Freya, and her handmaiden Fulla.
An engaging, modern-day Faust for brainy rockers.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9911059-0-8
Page Count: 610
Publisher: Nigel's Flight
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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