A coming-of-age novel set in rural Mississippi during the 1960s offers up such potentially juicy elements as racial strife, religious fanaticism, child abuse, and grown-up duplicity, yet proves disappointingly ``young adult'' in perspective and style. Haines, who has written several novels under a pseudonym, takes as her narrator 13-year-old Bekkah Rich, who may look like any other kid living on Kali Oka Road outside of Jexville, Miss., but who is in several significant ways atypical. Daughter of a children's book author and a college professor, Bekkah is destined by brains as well as background for a larger world that few of her playmates will ever see. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1963, that world makes an appearance on Kali Oka Road in two quick, successive strokes: Zombielike members of the Blood of the Redeemer Church move into the abandoned Live for Christ Church quarters nearby; and the old, deserted McInnis plantation is taken over by a shockingly eccentric, bleached-blond horse owner named Nadine Andrews. Curiosity tempts Bekkah to spy on the weird ``Redeemers,'' and her passion for horses leads her to sign up as Nadine's stable hand, despite stern orders from her mother to the contrary. As the summer slowly passes and Bekkah's liberal parents face their own first battles in the civil rights war, the teen discovers horrifying goings-on that seem to include the selling of babies, the beating of children, the torture of animals, the seduction of minors, and, finally, the murder of an innocent child. Haines's evocation of a particular place and time are certainly masterful, but her melodramatic plot is severely hindered by her narrator's early-adolescent point of view. Bekkah's simple heart gets in the way of what might otherwise have been a gripping story, leaving the reader wanting more. (Literary Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: June 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93787-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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