An ambitious story of a tough woman’s experiences across four decades.
The first novel of Collins’ (The Hunter of Hertha, 2015, etc.) Midnight Valley Quartet tells the story of a Kentuckian’s long fight for survival.
From early childhood, Randi Jo Gaylor finds the world stacked against her. As one of 13 children in Notown, a poor, white section of Crimson County, Kentucky, in the 1940s, Randi Jo, dressed in sackcloth, spends her days begging and stealing food to supplement her meager diet of beans. Times are hard enough when her father is working as a coal miner, but whenever he gets locked up in jail or incapacitated with black lung, they become dire. As the years go on, Randi Jo confronts abuse, murder, racism, and burdensome family secrets. This traumatic life is seemingly dictated by Notown itself, where “meanness ran in people’s veins.” Randi Jo hopes to escape her environment when she becomes a teenage bride to a young man from a comparatively wealthy neighboring town, but the young couple eventually ends up back in Notown, nonetheless. Decades pass, and Randi Jo goes through a divorce, a violent marriage to a low-level gangster, and further degradation. At times, the tragedies of Randi Jo’s life come with dizzying speed, but the strong first-person narration and sympathetic characters keep readers emotionally invested in the twisting narrative. There are some awkward formal aspects to the novel—a “Fear Angel” motif is heavy-handed, and a 1980s storyline initially feels forced—but the way Collins portrays Randi Jo’s development over decades of trauma is quite impressive. The protagonist is supported by a rich cast of secondary characters, primarily her family members, who deal with the hands they’ve been dealt in their own ways. The scope of emotional experience and brutality in this novel is vast, yielding a rich, evocative tale of one woman’s trials. “Your life,” Randi Jo’s daughter observes, “has been about surviving it.”
An ambitious story of a tough woman’s experiences across four decades.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-937356-31-6
Page Count: 428
Publisher: BearCat Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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