by Suzanne Redfearn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013
A compelling tale of the deceit, violation and anguish that undergird the myth of suburbia.
Jill Kane lives in a suburban dystopia. Beneath the Little League games, the lovingly packed school lunches, the manicured lawns and scrubbed kitchen floors lie the family secrets.
Working hard to maintain the facade of the perfect family, Jill is a talented architect who has risen to become the youngest vice president of Harris Development, the third largest design firm in the nation. Her husband, Gordon, is a well-respected cop, a devoted father to 8-year-old Drew and 4-year-old Addie, and a violently abusive husband. Afraid and ashamed, Jill hides bruises beneath her expensive blouses, popping emergency contraception after each attack. The pressure builds until Jill bolts. Her flight—and the reawakening of her affair with Jeffrey, a client—provokes even more persecution from Gordon. Jill swiftly finds herself battling not only for custody of her children, but also for her own reputation, as Gordon exploits his power within the police force to cast doubts upon her sobriety, as well as her fitness to parent. More sinisterly, Jeffrey turns up dead. Briefly finding refuge within a remote Native American community, Jill realizes that she cannot endanger others to protect herself and her children any longer. To truly escape Gordon’s control, she will have to destroy Gordon’s reputation, and her best friend, Connor, in-house counsel for Harris Development, is eager to conspire. Complicating matters, though, are her new pregnancy and a devastating diagnosis. Redfearn’s debut ratchets up the tension page by page, as husband and wife try to inflict the most damage on each other without harming the kids. Every character hides something, and each surprising revelation torques the plot further. The emotional and physical injuries mount, driving inexorably toward a surprising climax.
A compelling tale of the deceit, violation and anguish that undergird the myth of suburbia.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-455-57320-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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