A sadly familiar tale by Leavitt (Coming Back to Me, 2001, etc.), though ably written in a straightforward style: likely to...
An open adoption goes awry, in an eighth outing by the Boston Globe columnist.
Bewildered by the experience of giving birth, 16-year-old Sara turns to her emotionally remote parents, Jack and Abby, for help—but they want nothing to do with their newborn granddaughter, Anne. George and Eva, the adoptive parents, at first welcome Sara into their home, hoping she will relinquish the baby in due time, but they become increasingly uneasy as the months go by and she doesn’t leave. The adoption is not yet final, however, and they don’t want to upset her. Then, panicked by the prospect of losing the only person on earth who truly belongs to her after Danny, the baby’s father, decamps, Sara takes Anne and runs, though she’s caught at the end of a long trip on a Greyhound bus. Her well-meaning parents intervene and she loses custody, going on to college in New York, a copywriting job, and a love affair with an architect. Sixteen years later, a chance meeting with Danny, happily married to an angelic woman now pregnant with his child, reawakens Sara’s hopes of a reunion with her daughter. She is shocked to find that he never actually signed the papers relinquishing his parental rights (his brother did); and further, that her father told Danny that she hated him and never wanted to see him again. Can a private detective find Anne? Switch to teenaged Anne’s POV: she’s a bright, lovable misfit who yearns to be a writer and endures the scathing comments of unfeeling teachers, obnoxious classmates, and her perpetually disappointed mother. She wonders idly why she’s so different, red hair and all, not knowing that she was adopted or anything about her birth mother. The moment of truth isn’t far off, happy endings awaiting all these troubled souls.
A sadly familiar tale by Leavitt (Coming Back to Me, 2001, etc.), though ably written in a straightforward style: likely to appeal to teenagers and their parents as well.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-27122-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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