An incendiary tale featuring mythic and realistic elements.
A girl whose skin is black on the right side of her body, white on the left, becomes a magical figure in an apocalyptic future in this YA fantasy novel.
A full-on race war rages across a near-future America, pitting black and white Americans against one another: “There was no African American anymore, no Asian, no Native American, and no more Hispanic or Middle Eastern people. If you weren’t white, you were black.” The assassination of a far-right president by a militant black separatist leads to a police-state climate, resulting in murders, arrests, and mass incarcerations of black people in cities across the country. For Jetta, a sheltered 14-year-old girl in New Orleans, the horrors are particularly personal; she was inexplicably born half-white, half-black. When she was an infant, firefighters and paramedics barely rescued her from a deadly church-burning by neo-Nazis. Raised by her loving grandmother in a black household, she’s considered freakish by both militant factions; as a result, she customarily hides the white side of her face under a hoodie in public. The genocidal destruction of a New Orleans neighborhood makes Jetta a fugitive; Tyler, another resilient survivor whose brother is a fighter for a black nation-state, accompanies her. Jetta’s other traveling companions include the friendly ghosts of her grandmother and other slain friends, plus a cheerful, drum-playing drunk who, significantly, bears the name of an African storm god. In short, exciting chapters, prolific thriller writer Rose (Waltzing Matilda, 2018, etc.) spins an action-fantasy yarn with a hot-button premise that will strike some readers as urgently timely and others as being in questionable taste. As the story goes on, it moves away from gritty, gory descriptions of large-scale urban civil warfare and into magical-realism territory involving spirits and symbolic monsters, akin to those in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 fantasy novel, American Gods. Rose strives ambitiously to make a bigger metaphorical statement about the nature of human conflict, although it’s an unfocused one with an open-ended conclusion. Readers may find it easier to latch onto the story’s nightmarish left-versus-right mortal combat than its immortal deities wrestling with their destinies.
An incendiary tale featuring mythic and realistic elements.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973279-42-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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