A zippy, engrossing, and offbeat work of historical fiction.
The dynamic adventures of a folkloric outlaw.
The legend of this book’s resilient Cherokee protagonist, uniquely named Zesty Sundrops (after his mother’s favorite salsa), springs forth from the opening pages. In late 1941, Zesty drives two recently released convicts to a remote area, where his younger brother and partner in crime, Hoot, shoots them dead with a shotgun. The Sundrops brothers are mob-commissioned contract killers, but they’re increasingly reluctant ones. They’re eager to change their lives by establishing a wholesale truffle business, which they think will bring them happiness. That plan is derailed when Zesty, desperate for excitement, joins the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. Prolific author John Zodrow (Tracking Bobby, 2016, etc.), writing pseudonymously as Mark, demonstrates a definite knack for consistent action, which won’t fail to keep readers on their toes. Zesty’s exhilarating military tour of duty fighting Nazis and Italian forces in Europe, for instance, showcases the character’s bravado, determination, cunning, and valor. He’s captured by the enemy, but he manages to escape what seems to be certain doom. Later, world-renowned writer Ernest Hemingway pens a manuscript about Zesty’s early life; that narrative, along with a multiact stage play about Zesty (written by “Henry Hall”), splices the story into thirds, and each section is satisfying and immensely entertaining. Some elements feel particularly realistic, as when Zesty meets and romances the love of his life, Gwen Sutton, and when Zesty seeks vengeance against the Native American gang that murdered his parents. Although Zesty and Hoot seem nearly inseparable at its beginning, the novel is very much dominated by Zesty’s adventures; at one point, he even assassinates Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and undergoes a court martial for war crimes. In true Zesty style, he emerges from jail more than a decade later to continue his gun-toting shenanigans.
A zippy, engrossing, and offbeat work of historical fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-104-8
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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