by Wesley Gibson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1992
A coy first novel featuring a blue-collar Virginia family whose house is slowly sinking—along with their collective outlook on life. Gibson's debut lacks the zip of some of its thematic predecessors (Geek Love, The Beans of Egypt, Maine) but finally engages the reader through sheer tenacity. From the day Joan realizes that her house in Virginia is gradually plunging into the earth, nothing seems to go right for the Demerest family. Already, Melissa, the eldest of Joan's four children, is in the throes of adolescent rebellion—experimenting with sex, drugs, and fast-moving cars. Then four-year-old Kevin pushes second-oldest Daryl down the stairs, while nine-year-old Brenda, a budding Young Republican, writes fashion advice for the school newspaper and schemes to become the next Nancy Reagan. Meanwhile, husband Kyle, who fills cigarette machines for a living, is no help to Joan as he shacks up with an unemployed blond; and though Joan continues to struggle against the forces that are eroding her family's life, the momentum of the Demerests' destiny proves too strong to combat. Soon the house sinks to its second- story windows, giant bugs invade the lawn, antisocial Kevin's strange genius for painting fades away at the onset of adolescence, and Melissa announces that she's a lesbian. When Daryl's skin turns green, causing him to quit school and join a traveling freak-show with Kyle's accommodating lover (leaving Kyle to wander the streets as a homeless, unemployed drunk), Joan begins to understand how impossible life is to control—and how only in letting go can any joy be found. Often depressing when it means to amuse; still, a brave and intriguing debut.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-58582-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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 Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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