A stirring novel with a distinctive young narrator.
Boerner follows the trials of a girl’s childhood in 1970s Arkansas in this debut novel.
When 10-year-old Gracie Lee Abbott walks up to a church pulpit, her pastor asks her if she’s there to be saved. “No sir,” she tells him, “I just came up to say hello and ask you to pray for my Daddy. He’s mean to Momma, he drinks too much beer, and I think he’s probably going to Hell.” It isn’t what the pastor is expecting to hear, but it’s what’s been on Gracie’s mind. Her father’s drinking has created a great deal of stress in her household, as have the ceaseless rains that threaten to drown her family’s cotton crop. Her admission to the pastor has some unintentional consequences—not the least of which is a full-immersion baptism for herself—that start the girl off on a year of confrontations and discoveries. The greatest is a mysterious gray house at the edge of her family’s property, where an unknown man recently shot himself. As Gracie attempts to learn French, meet Elvis, and wean herself off of dolls, her precociousness sets in motion a series of events that shake up her life and force her to grow up faster than she expected. Boerner’s prose is a wonderful medium for unspooling Gracie’s story, imbued with all the snark, wonder, and colorful details that characterize childhood. She expertly draws Gracie and her family, including her erratic, brutish father, her harried, no-nonsense mother, and her chirpy, imaginative younger sister, making them endearing and infuriating in equal measure. The book feels long at more than 300 pages, as the narrative meanders for much of its length, but Gracie’s voice is captivating enough to make readers trust in Boerner’s storytelling. The ending isn’t shocking but is affecting and earned. The author addresses real, high-stakes issues without slathering them in melodrama or saccharine sentimentality, and her book hearkens back to an older YA tradition of stories of plucky preteen girls, spooky houses, and inevitable tragedies that help mark the turning point from childhood to adolescence.
A stirring novel with a distinctive young narrator.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940869-61-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Southern Yellow Pine Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2016
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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