Fanny Flagg meets W.P. Kinsella in Kiraly's (California Rush, 1990) whimsical account of an eccentric midwestern family, their various predicaments, and the solution to these via a rare baseball card. Rollie Zerbs is the town character of La Porte, Missouri. Retired from the bar he owned most of his life, he now ties fishing line and hooks to the keys of an old typewriter cantilevered out from his dock and spends his days editing the poetry written on it by the fish of the Mississippi River. As the town declines, Rollie is becoming both the most famous thing about it and its greatest embarrassment. And with his memory waning and his phony reports of being burglarized, the decision is to put him away somewhere. Enter Rollie's grandson Cooper, living in Chicago and working for the Neatly Chiseled Features newspaper syndicate. Cooper, who recently suffered a blow to the head defending a tenuously connected girlfriend, is a little befuddled by life himself, and when both his mother and Rollie call asking for help, he returns to La Porte. Rollie admits to Cooper that while his memory is declining, the break-ins are real: Someone has been trying to steal his baseball card, an incredibly rare Wildfire Schulte card from a 1909 Robert Higuera cigar-box set. The two decide that selling the valuable card could be a solution to all their problems: Rollie could pay someone to care for him at home, and he, Cooper, and Cooper's high- school and current sweetheart, Charlotte, could revive the abandoned restaurant on the river and get the town back on its feet. The high jinks really start when the three journey to Chicago to try to sell Rollie's card at a collectors' convention. Apparently there are a great many quirky homicidal maniacs who collect baseball cards. Teetering at times on the brink of terminal cuteness, but, still, a charming and often funny tale.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-425-14951-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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