A captivating animal tale that explores universal themes.
A wolf comes of age and finds his place in the world.
In this debut novel, a wolf goes from vulnerable cub to independent adult, navigating a landscape where the weather and other animals can be beneficial or dangerous. The book opens with the unnamed narrator as a sheltered young pup, just beginning to meet his family (young sister, White-Ears; Ma and Pa; and older brother, Scruff-Paw) and explore the world outside his den. The narrator and White-Ears learn to hunt, read the messages left by other animals, and be on guard against threats. After Scruff-Paw fights with his parents and leaves to make his own way in the world, the family heads west, looking for more safety and better hunting on the coast. During the journey, the narrator and White-Ears are left alone when their parents face off against an unfamiliar pack of wolves. When it becomes clear that Ma and Pa will not be returning, the two siblings head for the coast. White-Ears is injured, and the narrator takes care of her, stealing food from a wolf he dubs Notch-Tail. After his sister bonds with another wolf they meet, the narrator takes off alone to search for his parents one last time. He faces new dangers, fights to survive, and eventually reconnects and mates with Notch-Tail. The pair’s cubs face tragedies of their own, and the wolf family continues to find moments of joy where it can. Rong does an excellent job of transforming the wolves into dynamic characters, with needs and emotions that are compelling to readers but not overly humanlike, differentiating them with plausible quirks, like the narrator’s love of fishing. The descriptive language is vivid, particularly when it comes to the narrator’s hunting and feeding sessions (“I reached into the belly and pulled out a chunk of meat, and I ate it whole, feeling the tender strands pop in my mouth, mashing against my teeth before sliding down my throat”). The solid story delivers a generally satisfying coming-of-age plot that celebrates the natural world without romanticizing it.
A captivating animal tale that explores universal themes.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77785-850-6
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Teng Rong
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
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A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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