A well-crafted, satisfying family tale.
A debut novel tells the story of an 8-year-old boy acclimating to life in a new town.
Ohio, 1954. Jesse Hall’s parents’ marriage is on the rocks. His father gambles away their money, and his mother, Viola, suffers from mental illness. After Viola attempts suicide and then becomes pregnant, she takes Jesse away to start a new life without the boy’s father. After a brief stay with her parents that doesn’t go well, Viola and Jesse are forced to find a place of their own. They end up in Sabina, “The Eden of Ohio,” where a kindly landlord gives them a discounted apartment and an old sewing machine for Viola to make a living. Jesse meets some kind people, including Karen, the pretty woman who works at the Five and Dime, and Lynn Ott, another 8-year-old who doesn’t have a father. He also meets bullies, both young and old, who are unsympathetic to his difficult past. There is even a risk that a social worker will remove him from his mother’s care. Through that long first summer in Sabina, Jesse longs to live with any of his three half siblings and for his parents to get back together. He remembers the first rule his grandfather taught him—“Do no harm”—and says his prayers for his family: “I pray for healing for my mom and dad. I thank you for your blessings. Amen.” In his series opener, Hess writes in a measured prose that captures the subtleties of Jesse’s thoughts with precision and lyricism. Here the author describes Jesse’s reaction after his mother is hospitalized following a suicide attempt and his father tells them they have to move: “I turned the car radio on and pressed the button to a station playing Deck the Halls. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I stared out the car window. Kids were getting on buses. I kept manipulating the jacket zipper, but it stayed stuck in the middle while it was getting colder outside.” The book is not especially plot heavy, but it is a page-turner nonetheless. It harkens back to coming-of-age literature of a much earlier era, where lessons are gleaned slowly from observing the lives of other people.
A well-crafted, satisfying family tale.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9995640-0-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
