by Tenaya Darlington ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2004
Darlington’s wry wit and all-encompassing compassion help us love her characters, even those least like us.
Not all dysfunctional families are alike, as first-novelist Darlington (stories: Madame Deluxe, 2000) shows in a swift-moving and accomplished take on the parent-child wars.
Gretchen Glide, with hirsute boyfriend Ray, a performance artist, sneaks into her childhood basement bedroom in Fort Cloud, Wisconsin. Upstairs, father Rusty, home from his auto salesman job, hangs his trousers and jacket at the door, heads for the kitchen for a six-pack of beer, then settles in to watch David Attenborough on PBS. Mother Judy arrives next from her job teaching gym instead of home economics at the high school, pads to the kitchen in her nylon stockings to slide out a pair of mauve heels from under the sink, and reaches for the butterscotch schnapps behind the crock-pot. Downstairs, Gretchen and Ray struggle out of their ski gear and make love, conceiving a child. Gretchen, her brother Carson, who left home to join a cult in his teens, and their older brother Henry, who ran off to start a rock band, have all rebelled violently against their parents. Now, Gretchen’s pregnancy, and her involvement with a group of Chicagoans interested in “gender-neutral” parenting, set family reunion and confrontation into motion. Mom, Dad, and Gretchen all get a say in this remarkably balanced story. Rusty’s take on Ray (“the Chimp”) can be hilariously on target, as can Judy’s yearning to be an involved grandmother and Gretchen’s gradual awakening to a sense of her parents as human beings. Judy tries to fit in, knitting black “onesies” for the baby and spending time with Gretchen’s guru, who is raising two gender-neutral youngsters named after galaxies (M16 and M64). Their sex is to be a secret until they’re five, but there are clues: M64 has a forbidden Barbie doll. By the time Gretchen comes home from the hospital with her baby, the family has been transformed.
Darlington’s wry wit and all-encompassing compassion help us love her characters, even those least like us.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-00075-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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