by William T. Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2013
Sometimes harrowing, this striking account of an African-American’s life in Los Angeles delivers powerful moments.
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In a debut book about growing up black in California in the 1970s, a teenager attempts to avoid violence despite racism and gang warfare.
Roger, the oldest of four children, lives in South Central Los Angeles. This autobiographical novel opens with the then-14-year-old chafing against his “Little Worshipers” classification at Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. Moms and Pops force him and his siblings to attend church every Sunday—even though he has encountered bullies there, as well as at school—but he eventually chooses to become a member and be baptized. At a time when Crips and Bloods are in the ascendant, church is presented as a positive influence that counterbalances violence. Roger recognizes that he is fortunate to grow up in a two-parent family. Still, life isn’t easy for a young black man. The volume dramatizes Roger’s struggles with racism through a presentation of his experiences at the several schools he attends as a teenager. First he and a friend try to prove they can survive at an all-white junior high 27 miles away, but “everybody looked at Ron and me like we were from Pluto,” even scattering watermelon seeds around their lockers. After being attacked by a mob of white teenagers wielding pipes, Roger finally transfers to a school within walking distance that’s friendlier to African-Americans. Here, though, Crips steal kids’ lunch money, and Roger falls in with a rough crowd and gets caught shoplifting. At his final school, blacks and Mexicans go head-to-head, and an unfortunate incident sees him arrested at age 17. Anderson’s dialogue is strong throughout this lively novel, as is the sense of internal conflict between Christianity and carnal desire: “I was willing to throw part of my faith out the church window for the sake of getting” sex, he recalls. In a series of black-and-white photos—labeled, textbooklike, “Figure 1” and so on—Anderson revisits his childhood haunts, another strategy, though perhaps a superfluous one, for bringing Roger’s story to life. The cliffhanger ending suggests that the author may be contemplating a sequel.
Sometimes harrowing, this striking account of an African-American’s life in Los Angeles delivers powerful moments.Pub Date: May 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4895-7042-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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