A bright, brash, candid novel with a compelling story about one family in a rough part of town.
A troubled family in a hardscrabble Nevada trailer park longs for success and uncovers a family secret in Case’s (I'm Going to the Doctor?!, 2015, etc.) novel.
Janice Sloan has never given up on her dream of being a singer, and at 48, she knows that time is running out. The karaoke contest at the local bar comes with a sizable prize, and Janice plans to win it and finally take off for Nashville. She seeks happiness, “The kind that could give her goose bumps on a hot summer day for no other reason than the sun warmed her skin.” But she has seven kids, an alcoholic husband, and has been trapped in the run-down Bengal Trailer Park for 30 years. Her husband, Harry, has just woken up with bloody knuckles after a drunken binge, and later in the day, he strikes Janice, who kicks him out. Teenage daughter Carrie has been saving for college and making plans to escape the trailer and live a better life. She’s an excellent student, but her parents haven’t cooperated with filling out the student loan forms. Adult son WJ belongs to a local gang. Discharged from the military after being exposed as gay, WJ has turned into a rage-filled aggressor who deals drugs to people in a community that doesn’t have many happy outcomes. As the family clings to stability, the layers of the past begin to unfold, centering around Janice’s roots in Minnesota. An old secret has the potential to tear apart the family but may also lead to peace of mind for those who need it most. Case’s tightly plotted novel dives right into the center of the cast’s working-class problems. The characters’ dreams and ambitions are palpable and tend to propel the family through each crisis no matter how bleak. In frank but polished writing, Case has created imperfect characters that have a remarkable knack for hanging on through tough times. This trailer park is where almost everyone fails, but the conclusion is infused with an optimism that highlights the strength of the world Case has so carefully created.
A bright, brash, candid novel with a compelling story about one family in a rough part of town.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997015-5-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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