Daxton Chambers may have found a woman tailor-made for him. Mackenzie Morgan wins the Ranger over not just with her curves,...
A Texas Ranger’s newly discovered romance may be threatened by a serial killer who buries women alive in Stoker’s (Protecting Jessyka, 2015, etc.) thriller, the first in a series.
Daxton Chambers may have found a woman tailor-made for him. Mackenzie Morgan wins the Ranger over not just with her curves, but her quirks—a tendency toward rambling and unmitigated clumsiness. Mackenzie also distracts Daxton from the case he’s working with the feds: finding the Lone Star Reaper, who’s been calling authorities to tell them where he’s buried his latest victims. The Reaper soon focuses his attention on Daxton and his new girlfriend. And the worst happens: Mackenzie calls him to say she’s somewhere underground—and doesn’t have long before she suffocates. The novel establishes its romance early and well. Mackenzie is a winsome protagonist who defies formula: she’s short, practical, and isn’t model-thin. It’s easy to see why Daxton find her so appealing, especially when she laughs after spilling a drink or food on herself. Daxton is, a little disappointingly, more stereotypical: muscular, masculine, protective, and sporting what Mackenzie calls a “fourteen-pack.” Their relationship builds naturally as they push past the initially awkward getting-to-know-you stage and inevitable sex scenes before dropping an “I love you” or two—all without ever being sappy. There’s not much thriller here. Daxton’s case steers clear of the foreground until Mackenzie is suddenly missing—her call to Daxton amping up the narrative’s intensity. Stoker ultimately reveals the Lone Star Reaper, but the killer’s identity and brief appearance are neither shocking nor particularly scary. But Daxton’s desperation to find Mackenzie is rousing and believable, and readers will have a white-knuckle read until the end.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-943562-01-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
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 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
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