A well-intentioned but disappointing tale of women’s military experiences, but one that will likely be of interest to Army...
A fictional chronicle of military women, including a few of the first to attend West Point.
Personal, professional, and romantic dramas abound in this this sequel to Doll and VanDyke’s, debut novel, Refined by Fire (2014). The first installment introduced Lori and Trish, two of the first female students at West Point in the 1970s. In this one, the authors take them to Germany, where they get their first taste of real Army life in Cadet Troop Leadership Training. Meanwhile, Maura, Amelia, and Anne from the first book struggle to find their paths as women in the military, balancing their personal desires and professional obligations. Maura, assigned as Lori’s sponsor, forms a bond with her, and any reservations Lori might have about not being assigned to a fellow West Pointer quickly fade. But Maura also must consider her growing attraction to Eric, a firmly off-limits colonel; Amelia wonders whether or not she should get married; and Anne is faced with a family crisis. After Lori and Trish head back to West Point, they and their college friends have their own problems to deal with, including sexism from their fellow students and those higher up the chain of command. Doll and VanDyke draw on their own military experience, and their attention to period details and military rules and regulations is commendable and persuasive. The book’s unusual subject—women in the military—is also refreshing, as are its myriad depictions of female friendship. Unfortunately, the story is less a propulsive narrative than a series of events strung together, and the prose is often stiff. It’s hard to imagine anyone in a real-life dinner conversation saying, for instance, “I love the opportunities that come from being in the Army.”
A well-intentioned but disappointing tale of women’s military experiences, but one that will likely be of interest to Army buffs.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4575-3911-4
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2015
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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