by Terry Tracy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2011
A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.
An earnest, parsed, memoirlike depiction of a woman’s life with epilepsy.
If she hadn’t been diagnosed with epilepsy at 14, Mischa Dunn, who, with her Chilean diplomatic elite mother and Irish-American intellectual father immigrated to the U.S. after violent political conflict in Chile hit too close to home, would’ve faced more than her share of challenges. Tracy’s first book, cleverly organized into chapters named for seizure locations—“The Subway,” “The Ministry of Defense” —follows observant, cynical Mischa from 14 to 36 as she copes with the traumas of her medical condition and builds a life. The relationship Mischa has with her seizures is nuanced and complex and serves as proxy for any rupture in life’s peace, mental or physical. The book speaks to a broader audience than epileptics. Mischa says, “Just me. I go to bed with my epilepsy, I wake up with my epilepsy.” The implication rings true throughout the book: we fall asleep as ourselves, rise as ourselves and find our own solutions. Tracy calls her book a “novelry,” a novel of composite stand-alone short story parts, although it reads more like a memoir. Plot and character are replaced by history and opinion in a kind of slice-of-life-style narrative. Individually, chapters are weak threads in Mischa’s story. Mischa’s observations are often cynical, bordering on politely snide, which, because of Tracy’s tendency to tell, instead of show the why and how in her novel, opinions sometimes feel like reductive or insensitive condemnations of certain characters, NGOs Mischa works with or even entire cultures. The many doctors in the book are treated with simplistic, categorical disgust, and Chapter 23, of 27, is a strangely long-winded dialogue between two pregnant women in a coffee shop; watery soliloquies twist the novel toward its somber conclusion in a sudden, disjointed way. Some readers may find interwoven historical or factual information or opinion interesting, but it blurs lines between narrative and authorial voice in at times dangerous, confusing ways.
A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.Pub Date: April 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453834701
Page Count: 279
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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