by Vaughn T. Stanford ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2006
Appealing to the Law & Order addict interested in crime, not narrative.
Violence and abuse dominate in this part-gripping, part-lackluster collection of seven short stories from first-time author Stanford.
Stanford is from Trinidad and Tobago, but readers hoping to gain insight into Caribbean history and culture from this collection will be disappointed. Instead, they will find lurid scenes of horrific crimes and revenge that–while provocative–tell little of island life. The neighborhoods of Desires easily could be in Anytown, U.S.A., save for a few nuanced signs of island life (tropical breeze, coconut trees) and name-dropping (Port of Spain, Tunapuna). Even the graphic illustrations in each chapter do not help root readers in a place or time. Stanford gives much more attention to exploring universal questions: What is right? What is wrong? What is justice? Each story follows different characters and uses crime as a backdrop to show what happens when an institution–like school, jail or even marriage–fails to protect its citizens from harm. In some stories, like “Desire” and “A Question of Justice,” above-the-law crusaders tackle the injustice. In others, such as “When Tears Are Not Enough” and “The Victim,” peace comes only after the victim transcends abuse. Stanford captivates with shocking plot twists and turns, as in “The Letter,” when an abused son repeatedly stabs his father and then commits suicide. But he’s not always so deft, and in many places, pacing is off–he doesn’t know when to show or tell, or if it’s better to reveal nothing at all. In “Beyond Suspicion,” a whodunit, Stanford builds dramatic tension only to have it dissipate in one final, empty scene. The ultimate criminal is such a marginal character, and his incentive to murder so preposterous, that it feels anti-climactic. Other stories, like “Two to Tangle,” feel weighted down by too-revealing dialogue that comes off as stale and awkward.
Appealing to the Law & Order addict interested in crime, not narrative.Pub Date: July 21, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4257-0392-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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