A probing, sometimes-intriguing summer’s tale.
A coming-of-age novel follows a young woman searching for a direction in her life.
In the late 1980s, Lee Bauer returns home to Toledo, Ohio, after flunking out of her first year of college. Lee’s grades suffered not from a dearth of intelligence, but a lack of motivation; she became uninterested in school and “flaked” on her homework. She’s lost her connection with longtime friend Courtney—who seemed to thrive in her first year at college—and is burned out by the social scene in Toledo, full of fellow ne’er-do-wells getting high at house parties, like Derrick, a muscular pothead who’s coming off a tough breakup. To pay back her parents—her gruff father, a postman, and her weary mother, a waitress—Lee finds a job at an ice cream factory, toiling eight hours a day packaging products on an assembly line. While the position eventually becomes mindless to her, she makes friends with some of her fellow shift workers: Paul, a gossip hound; Ned, a family man; Kevin, a younger worker with eyes for Lee; and Kris, a witty, fascinating woman. As Lee starts to form new bonds, she also begins to more fully explore her desire for women, something she had only briefly indulged in before. As the summer progresses, Lee must confront her listlessness and find a life for herself, lest she fall into the trap of working at the factory full time. Yost’s (Votives, 2017, etc.) prose is meditative, imbuing the milieu of the small city with existential weight. Lee is well-developed as a central character, sadly realistic about her hometown (“Toledo never had anything to offer teenagers or college kids…they were the lost generation redone. In Toledo, we sought dark woods and abandoned alleys in which to get stoned or screwed, then faced the endless problem of what to do after burning the joint or buttoning the pants. Prospects were bleak for the unimaginative”). Her quest for meaning is full of mistakes and setbacks as well as illuminating steps toward clarity, particularly in discovering her sexuality. The rest of the characterization is a bit uneven—Lee’s father and Kris have captivating, rounded characters while Lee’s mother and sister, for instance, can feel static. The plot comes to a subtle, if uneasy, end, which is fitting for Lee’s character but will likely be somewhat frustrating for readers.
A probing, sometimes-intriguing summer’s tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9984146-0-7
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Radial Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2018
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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