A richly textured and absorbing fictional exploration of campus rape culture and its many victims.
In this third installment of a series, a seasoned therapist gets involved in a college rape case.
Kraus (All God’s Children, 2014, etc.) takes her main character, an experienced therapist and mediator who’s worked for over 30 years in the small town of Kaw Valley, into the world of college “hookup culture” and the murky complications of campus rape allegations. Grace McDonald has been taking referrals from the Kaw Valley Rape Crisis Center. Her good friend Kaw Valley policewoman Patsy Tsosie is working a case concerning a young woman named Hannah, who claims she was raped at a party by a fraternity brother called Logan Whiteman. From Patsy, Grace learns the familiar barrage of grim statistics: 88 percent of women raped on campus don’t report it; 16 percent of college women will be sexually assaulted in some way; 26 percent of reports lead to an arrest; and only 20 percent of those result in prosecution (as the protagonist mordantly observes, “Roulette has better odds”). Grace’s latest referral, a young woman named Shelby Stewart, is haunted by her encounter with business major Hunter Payne, who secretly drugs women and pleasures himself—and takes copious photographs—while they’re unconscious. But whereas Hunter is guilty in a more straightforward sense, Logan’s case seems more complicated. As he doggedly insists, what happened between him and Hannah wasn’t rape, it was just a “hookup.” As one character exasperatedly asks, “Why use tax dollars to pay for DNA tests when the guy conceded at the first damn interview that, ‘Yeah, sure, we had sex. So what?’ ” In the face of institutional inertia and indifference, Grace and Hannah go outside the law in order to pursue justice. As in the previous volumes of the series, this novel is a complex, multifaceted, and refreshingly mature fictional examination of all sides of a social issue, in this case the complex dynamics of campus sexual assault. As Patsy observes at one point, “Juries do not convict clean-cut, well-mannered, white-boys for rape when there are no witnesses, no broken bones, no blood, no abduction, no serious signs of resistance or struggle.” Kraus does a scrupulous and realistic job of fleshing out all of her characters, including (although to a lesser extent) the tale’s villains, Hunter and Logan. And the story is at its most moving when dramatizing the complicated workings of shame, outrage, and insecurity that victims like Hannah feel. When walking around at school after her encounter with Logan, she repeats to herself: “I am safe. I’m in the middle of the campus in broad daylight. No one can hurt me.” But it doesn’t seem to help. The obtuseness of campus authorities, the bragging of Logan’s fellow frat dudes, and the slow seep of social shame (“Within twenty-four hours, Hannah was being treated as if she had cancer”) are conveyed with a smart refusal to rely on easy simplifications. Even the book’s most unlikely plot development, Hannah’s elaborate plan to seek “fantasy payback” against Logan, features enough believable details to convince readers—and make them wonder how many such schemes have actually happened.
A richly textured and absorbing fictional exploration of campus rape culture and its many victims.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997547-6-4
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Flint Hills Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2019
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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