A slim volume packed with rugged tales and smart, brawny characters.
Short stories on ranching and relationships.
Linse grew up on a ranch in Wyoming, broke her leg at 4 and a horse at 12. While her debut collection of stories spans 15 years of writing and vast narrative terrain, she never strays far from her roots. The folks who swagger and steal through these stories are tough; they’ve had it tough, but Linse carries them handily. In the title story, Birdie Gunderson is a farm girl but sees herself as neither girl nor boy but “an efficient cog in the machinery of the farm.” The story reads as a series of affirmations as a teenager struggles for identity amid the forces of society and tradition. Linse vividly renders the story with details likely gleaned from experience: using bag balm for cow teats as lip gloss; pollinating tomato plants at sunset. Strong women and girls dominate the collection. In “Nose to the Fence,” 14-year-old Cindy breaks in horses and city boys with arms made muscular by bailing hay. In “Mouse,” a 10-year-old rescues baby mice from the irrigation ditch but accepts their fate and dispatches each one with a heavy stone. Though less nuanced, Linse’s male narrators still hold the stories together. “Revelations,” for example, is full of bravado: With disjointed dialogue, three friends vie for control over women, nature and each other. “Hard Men” opens in perfect, deranged passion: Teenage Johnny has shot his father; the pizza man decomposes in the bathtub; Linse deftly sets the scene, weaves in back story, and adds a waft of bacon and the feel of blood through Scotchgarded carpet. Like most of Linse’s characters, Johnny is clever, and he wrangles the unfathomable to a rational end. But the end comes too soon—Johnny raises more questions than several pages can answer, as do Cindy, Mouse, Birdie and others. Linse writes as if flexing her own ranch-toned muscles, creating intense, original characters and letting them loose. The result could fill a novel—or two. All bodes well for Linse’s future work.
A slim volume packed with rugged tales and smart, brawny characters.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9913867-0-3
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Willow Words
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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