Although this novel’s dialogue tends to lack panache, the story as a whole offers intriguing circumstances and outcomes.
Trammel (18 Years of Grace and Mercy, 2012) offers a novel about the lives of three intersecting characters and their relationships with God.
Benjamin lives in a pleasant condominium in Silver Spring, Maryland, and he’s doing quite well for himself, at least on the surface. He’s a college student by day and a drug dealer by trade, working for a man known to most people as “Hard Time.” The two are exacting and discreet, and, along with Benjamin’s friend Winn, they prove highly successful in a business that sends many others to jail; as Hard Time tells people, the reason he got his nickname is “because the police have a hard time catching my ass.” But how long will their luck last? Meanwhile, in New York City, an aging prostitute’s life is about to change. After a longtime customer offers her $10,000 if she’ll give up her profession, she sees it as an opportunity to return home to her troubled family. As she discards her street name, “Sunny,” for her given name, Hannah, she knows that a homecoming is necessary, though it certainly won’t be easy. Elsewhere, Marco Gibson has just been freed from prison in Virginia. After 20 years and nine months of being locked up, he’s determined to avoid the temptations of his drug-dealing brother, Hard Time. His main goal is to eventually serve his community and expound upon his Christian faith, but he knows well that the path ahead of him is steep. Trammel sets the stage for a collision of characters who are already connected, though they may not all realize it. Just what this collision will bring makes up the heart of this touching tale, which explores the choices that people make in life and their opportunities for redemption. The dialogue does veer toward the obvious at times, as when Marco explains that he doesn’t mind janitorial duties because “I’d rather push a broom in there on the low level than push drugs on the street in a low life.” Nevertheless, the story gets its lasting power from the qualities of its main characters’ personalities—people who may find themselves caught up in dire conditions but who ultimately find ways to look for light at the end of the tunnel.
Although this novel’s dialogue tends to lack panache, the story as a whole offers intriguing circumstances and outcomes.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62772-395-4
Page Count: 536
Publisher: America Star Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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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