A heartwarming and surprisingly realistic tale of first love in a Depression-era town.
A debut coming-of-age historical novel focuses on a teenager in the 1930s.
Fraser’s tale, set in a small town during the Depression, introduces 16-year-old Maggie Hanson, who lives with her Mum. Maggie is an impatient student at the local school, yearning to stop wasting her time in class and instead concentrate on helping her mother and finding some paying work of her own. The teen is enamored of medical student Ben Harder, who is “everything she wanted in a boyfriend. Smart, kind, handsome, and charismatic, and his parents were financially set, too.” The girl’s Mum, meanwhile, has been trying to arrange a relationship between Maggie and Victor Robertson. He is the good-looking son of Maggie’s mother’s best friend. Added to this mix is Tom Bancroft, an enigmatic older man who hires Maggie to help out around the house and soon begins captivating her, broadening her horizons by talking about the rise of Nazism and the school of Dadaism. He takes time out of his days to teach her chess, and gradually an undeniable attraction grows between them, with Tom himself reflecting at one point: “She had an effect on him, whether good or bad it was hard to tell, except to say that he felt more alive with her about.” The book’s nostalgic sentimentality for small-town life (“Old Mrs. Murphy was sitting with her daughter, who had been ill all winter, and still didn’ look right”) is often intriguingly belied by a sexual frankness that’s simultaneously mature and nuanced. Virtually all of the characters, including Maggie’s Mum, gossip in forthright terms about the sexual proclivities of other people. This helps to prepare readers for a dark turn in the plot involving Ben as well as the steady deepening of events concerning Tom. Fraser is lavish in her descriptions of the minutiae of small-town life (the book is a bit too long). But with Maggie, the author delivers a believably textured character. Fans of Janette Oke will feel right at home in these pages.
A heartwarming and surprisingly realistic tale of first love in a Depression-era town.Pub Date: July 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4602-9033-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
