This coming-of-age novel strives for maximum drama but stretches credibility.
Divorce, blackmail, love and murder collide in this complicated young-adult novel.
Caught in the middle of her parents’ messy split, 14-year-old Kate finds friendship and, eventually, her first love in charming, streetwise Lucky, who also comes from a broken family. Apart from Lucky, there is no safe haven for Kate, not even at Glenwood Junior High, where she becomes the target of violent sexual advances by Randy Johnson, a mentally disabled student whose behavior is inexplicably ignored by the school principal, and whose state-appointed lawyer seems more concerned with the intricacies of federal law than the well-being of either student. The principal, it turns out, is in league with a greedy real estate developer—who also happens to be the new boyfriend of Kate’s mother—and a complex plot emerges that involves corrupt public officials, blackmail and a shady land deal. While these nefarious bureaucratic doings may have been compelling in Keech’s first novel, The Crawlspace Conspiracy (1995), the subject matter is a reach for teen readers. The other prominent plotlines, unfortunately, also prove to be problematic. The characterization of Johnson, described by Kate as a “love-struck retard” and “jittery cretin” and vilified as a sex-hungry “moron” who “couldn’t even count to ten,” is at best an attempt to discuss stereotypes, but more often outright offensive. When Johnson is found shot to death near the school, the novel veers into a murder mystery that involves Kate and Lucky searching for Johnson’s supposed killer while falling under suspicion themselves. Add to the mix a teen pregnancy, accusations of incest, attempted suicide and neglectful parents who act more adolescent then their own teenagers, and there’s no shortage of drama and intrigue. What the novel is missing are authentic characters whose actions ring true.
This coming-of-age novel strives for maximum drama but stretches credibility.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983699002
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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