A mystery/coming-of-age tale with well-developed characters and appealing historical settings but hampered by pacing...
In Edwards’ (Finding Rosie, 2017) novel, a girl investigates the disappearances of two young women, 20 years apart, from the beachside hotel where she lives.
In June 1959, 11-year-old Mary Nell Morgan lives at the Surf and Sand Hotel in Hermosa Beach, California, where her mother works as a bookkeeper. Nell’s older brother Lonnie is employed in the kitchen, and their father works for an oil company in Saudi Arabia. Nell loves Sherlock Holmes stories, the ocean, learning to surf, and swimming in the hotel’s basement pool, which she has to herself in the early mornings. From the hotel’s handyman, Nell learns that in the summer of 1938, a starlet named Irene Young disappeared from the ballroom: “Only thing they ever found was her dancing shoes,” he says. “Oh, and a broken necklace at the bottom of the pool.” Nell decides she must discover what happened to Irene—especially after 15-year-old Jennifer Hazelwood, the hotel owner’s daughter, disappears, also leaving clothes and other traces near the basement pool. A detective who worked the 1938 case investigates both disappearances, eventually finding connections between Nell’s mother and Irene. A surprise discovery finally reveals the shocking truth. Edwards effectively assembles a number of intriguing elements in this mystery novel. Nell is an engaging character who’s thoughtful, a reader, athletic, and resourceful, and these qualities not only help her sleuthing, but also help her grow as a person. The historical settings are intriguing, as well, whether it’s 1938 with its Hollywood glamour and sleaze, or 1959, as California surfing gains popularity. Along the way, the book points out how the novel and film Gidget helped to make surfing more accessible to girls, and how they also inspire Nell. The parallel mysteries are compelling, with fine red herrings to keep readers guessing. However, the pace is slowed somewhat by repetition and inessential detail, and it’s disappointing that Nell makes a crucial discovery entirely by accident, instead of through detective work.
A mystery/coming-of-age tale with well-developed characters and appealing historical settings but hampered by pacing problems.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79666-832-2
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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
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