Younger and older readers alike will be baffled by this half-baked adventure.
A preteen bully and a 22-year-old con artist collide in Pascal's thriller.
The creator of the Sweet Valley High series turns to adult fiction with mixed results in a story set in a sleepy town on New York's Long Island. Here, 12-year-old “Big Larry” terrorizes a group of younger neighborhood kids including sensitive 10-year-old Charley and Charley's bright, determined 7-year-old sister, Lucy. Into this small-town scene drops shady, attractive Australian Luke, who has skipped bail and hitchhiked across the country from LA. He and Larry work up a mutual enmity while they're both shoplifting from a local drugstore. When, after a rendezvous on a deserted town beach with sweet, innocent drugstore clerk Daisy Rumkin, Luke takes shelter in a storm drain and is pinned down by falling debris, Larry seizes the opportunity to amp up his bullying game into full-scale torture, with the reluctant aid of the members of his little gang. Having gotten hold of his abusive father's gun, Larry makes plans that include not just the elimination of Luke, but violence inflicted on the entire community. Pascal knows how to craft short, snappy chapters that leave the reader wanting more, and little Lucy, described as “weird” by most of those who know her, makes an appealingly different heroine. But the novel is oddly untethered in time. While it's clear that this is supposed to be a relatively contemporary story—Harry Styles, for example, is the teen heartthrob referenced—the characters say things like “Your pa don't know beans” and “My ma says a bum'll steal the eyes out of your head.” Daisy thinks of herself as a “shopgirl” and has never heard of IMDb. In addition, Luke, in whose head we spend a significant portion of the novel and whose redemption is its main narrative arc, is a singularly unappealing hero.
Younger and older readers alike will be baffled by this half-baked adventure.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9826-1476-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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