A charmingly melodramatic love story with a likable protagonist, but only for the most fanatic lovers of mermaid mythos.
A romantic fantasy that does its best to keep up with the many misadventures of a young mermaid exploring the world of humans.
Dashed upon the rocks, the young mermaid Breeze is rescued by her parents after another mischievous episode. The maritime matriarch, Oceana, is livid with Neptune and blames him for encouraging their wayward daughter’s rebellious side. Neptune takes the criticism in full stroke. Both wrathful and mirthful, the Poseidon-cum-patriarch confesses that he encourages his daughter’s recklessness. After some stock bickering (relayed in capital letters) the mermaid emerges from her coma, and Breeze’s bildungsroman begins. Breeze was taught the “art” of changing her tail into legs, and now she is seeking love from a cruise-ship worker whom she has found at a nondescript port of call. However, all is not as it seems, for this is not a simple story about a mermaid and her quest for a working-class prince charming. Instead, there are several narrative grottos that Fraley (Only a Fortune Cookie, 2007, etc.) explores at varying depths. Just as the genuine, eventually engaging story arch has a few false starts, so does Breeze. With the ability to metamorphose her tail in twain, she struggles to find her footing in the human world. In one of the story’s most genuine, humorous moments, Breeze, who cannot yet speak to people, mounts an ad hoc rescue of fish from a band of fisherman. The anglers’ aggravation leads her to conclude that they must communicate by yelling. But Breeze’s ability to communicate with a skunk whose family has been demolished by an automobile unfortunately leads to some unintentionally humorous passages. A closer attention to style and narrative pacing could have thwarted such awkwardness. Too often a seemingly major character is introduced and disappears within the span of a few paragraphs. The mystery of Breeze’s true origins and her romantic entanglements are rendered with care, and it is fresh to find a mermaid tale slapping itself down on a modern setting. Repetitions of imagery, description and action test the reader’s patience and despite the surprises, the ending is less revelation than preparation for a sequel.
A charmingly melodramatic love story with a likable protagonist, but only for the most fanatic lovers of mermaid mythos.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4343-7379-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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