A well-constructed romp through a seldom-studied microcosm of American history.
A spirited bildungsroman set in the late 1800s and woven from the history of debut author Wuorinen’s (Cully’s Gold, 2010, etc.) hometown.
Sadie Coggins is thrilled to have been accepted into a private high school far from her sleepy little home in Lamoine, Maine. Unfortunately, her father’s financial losses and her mother’s never-ending list of chores make leaving for school impossible. Aghast at the idea of staying home with bullies like her nemesis, Frank Smith, Sadie vows to save up money for school in any way she can. She’s happy to work at her uncle’s fishing camp, but when she’s offered the opportunity to profit from a dubious trade, she finds her morals at odds with her ambitions. She’s not the only Lamoine youngster yearning to leave home: Her best friend, Rosa May, shares her desire to attend high school, and Frank dreams of sailing away on his father’s ship. When a mean-spirited prank goes too far, however, all of their dreams are suddenly endangered. Meanwhile, Sadie finds her personal relationships in disarray as she drifts apart from Rosa, disappoints her father and develops a relationship with her tomboyish co-worker Nell, whose ideas about staying home are nowhere close to Sadie’s. Middle-grade historical fiction tropes abound: Headstrong protagonist Sadie, prissy good girl Rosa May and Sadie’s gruff but gentle father can feel a little too familiar to readers of Little House on the Prairie–style fiction, but Wuorinen offers enough backstory to allow the most important characters to feel fleshed out, if not fully authentic. The novel is deeply anchored in its setting; photographs of the Coggins family emphasize the fact that Sadie was a real person, and the dialogue captures the vernacular of the time. However, chapter headings detailing the times of sunrise and high tide lend a slightly gimmicky tone to an otherwise well-developed sense of place and time. As the conflict evolves into an upbeat yet satisfyingly complex conclusion, themes of feminism and delayed gratification arise but aren’t preached.
A well-constructed romp through a seldom-studied microcosm of American history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1938883361
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2013
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
