Sometimes awkward but a satisfying synthesis of mystery, history, and emotion.
Thomson (Summon the Tiger, 2016) taps into the powerful emotional satisfaction that comes with solving a puzzle in this cozy mystery.
Maggie Fraser’s status as a fish out of water has served her well. After getting her business degree in Scotland, she moves to New York—far from her home and her well-meaning but overprotective family. She initially finds Manhattan inhospitable, but she meets and falls in love with Ben, a genuine, caring student who changes her outlook. Stilted dialogue somewhat undercuts the building chemistry and romance, but the warmth of the characters’ emotions nevertheless shines through: “I have always been interested in amazing structural designs, especially of ancient buildings. The arches with keystones. Flying buttresses and the strength seen in old, old structures that have allowed them to remain for hundreds, even thousands of years.” Despite concerns over where their respective careers might take them, they marry and find themselves in Italy, where Maggie is the happiest she’s ever been. Maggie’s life takes a harsh, strange turn when tragedy occurs, and she subsequently discovers a strange amulet. Investigating the relic’s origins takes her across the world and embroils her in a web of international intrigue that involves her family, friends, and confidants. It’s in these murky waters that Maggie begins to find herself, and in the unexpected sleuthing, she finds she’s not alone. Thomson’s prose is generally solid, but it sometimes resorts to telling rather than showing, even at the story’s most emotional moments: “She yanked her hands free and, crying uncontrollably, ran towards the stairs, towards her room. She was stopped by another policeman, who took her into his arms and hugged her strongly.” Nevertheless, the pacing is quick, and the element of travel provides rich backdrops and description. Readers will find the unfolding story charming and ultimately affirming.
Sometimes awkward but a satisfying synthesis of mystery, history, and emotion.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73284-891-7
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Quitt and Quinn
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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