A concise, cautionary tale about a woman exchanging pain for trust.
In Swanson’s debut novel, food provides more than physical sustenance for an introverted baker.
When readers first meet Anise Kaufmann, squatting in an abandoned restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y., with a cat named Mandy, she’s talking to her dead mother, Laura, and preparing a béchamel sauce with items from the neighborhood food bank. As she and Mandy partake of their unlit, gourmet meal, she re-examines her 47 years upon the Earth and how she’s kept her distance from other people—except to serve them delectable goods. Her “childhood light had gone out” after her mother drowned, but Laura’s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook eventually changed Anise’s life, awakening her appreciation for food and connecting her to Laura’s spirit. (“She visits me when I cook,” Anise confessed to her best friend in high school.) Anise eventually stumbled upon a stack of love letters among Laura’s things—not written by Anise’s father. Feeling confused and betrayed, she attended a cooking institute, hoping to find her own recipe for happiness; she got a dream job in a New York City bakery, which stole her ideas. One day, she came home to find her apartment in flames. After returning to Buffalo, through the redemption of fresh bread and her mother’s cookbook, she opened a humble, thriving bakery—until the tragic arrival of Pete, an Iraqi War veteran. “Humans act strange if left alone too long,” according to the novel’s omniscient narrator—a binding philosophy for Swanson’s powerful life study, as Anise encounters several odd, lonely characters on her numerous roads to salvation. Throughout the author’s taut, sometimes raw narrative, Anise’s distrust borders on misanthropy and makes her less than sympathetic, but strengthens the author’s message. Cast out into the cold streets, a pleasant surprise awaits Anise—but it may come a little too late to clear the wisps of melancholy that overwhelm Swanson’s tale.
A concise, cautionary tale about a woman exchanging pain for trust.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615777870
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Dorsett, McClaughlin & Whitney
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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