A feel-good holiday romance.
A miraculous Christmas tree farm brings a couple together in Passey’s (Mothering through the Whirlwind, 2015) novel.
Young, single mother Angela Donovan takes her 8-year-old daughter, Caroline, to Shafer Tree Farm in small-town Massachusetts, trying to take her own mind off the decidedly un-festive state of their lives. She’s strapped for rent money and $1,000 in debt, but wants to ignore all that so Caroline can have some kind of traditional Christmas. At the farm, she meets Mark Shafer, a handsome young man who’s set to become its new owner; when she notices him, her first thought is “Attractive. Not what I need right now.” Meanwhile, the farm’s current owner—Mark’s grandfather, “Papa” Shafer—promises little Caroline that if they “put up one of these Shafer trees and believe,” then she’ll have “a Christmas miracle.” Mark is immediately attracted to Angela, but he has his own problems; he’s been offered a very lucrative deal to sell the tree farm to corporate interests, but Papa is sure the deal would make wood chips out of the trees “faster than that little BMW of yours can get you to Boston.” Passey fairly briskly sets up a standard inspirational-romance plot, with a conflicted couple that may end up being each other’s salvation and a wise old man assuring everybody that there’s more to life than what we can see. However, the author saves the material from being completely derivative through the dialogue and chemistry of her two main characters. Mark, for example, has all the outward trappings of a simplistic jerk, but never actually is one, and Angela’s emotional shifts are conveyed crisply and believably. Passey successfully complicates the path of true love with plot turns that feel organic, not manipulative or contrived. Some secondary characters feel a bit simplified, such as Mark’s girlfriend, Natalie (“I love you,” he says, and one of her replies is “I guess you do”). But the novel’s climax delivers warm, sentimental memories of Christmases past.
A feel-good holiday romance.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9909840-6-1
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Winter Street Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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