First-timer Graham crosses lust with New Age longings in a hybrid-romance about a violinist who wins her man only after she dies. In Flint Hills, Kansas, Ethan Brown is called —Wordsworth— because he studied at Yale and has an extensive library in his law office downtown. Divorced, estranged from his teenaged son, and a little lonely despite his engagement to Katie Anne Mackey, daughter of the area’s most imposing cattle rancher, Ethan keeps his spirits up by focusing on his plan to start his own ranch adjoining the Mackeys——until, that is, he meets the new woman in town, Annette Zeldin, a now-famous violinist who left Kansas two decades ago, married, divorced, then stayed in Paris to raise a daughter and become —Europeanized.— The locals scoff at her, and at her daughter’s French accent, but Ethan is mesmerized by her depth and beauty—qualities lacking in the brash Katie Anne. Annette is in town to bury her mother before leaving forever, but her attraction to Ethan, who can quote Yeats to her on command, convinces her to stay. The mutual attraction is so strong that Ethan breaks his engagement and Annette turns her back on Paris to be a housewife in the Kansas hills. But when Katie Anne announces that she’s pregnant, Ethan feels honor-bound to marry her—and, soon after the wedding, a fire courses through the Mackeys’ and Ethan’s land, killing Annette and burning Katie Anne beyond recognition. As Annette’s spirit follows her mother toward heaven, she realizes that her love for her daughter necessitates that she remain bound to the world of the living: so she inhabits the body of her fellow burn victim, Ethan’s wife Katie Anne. The lovers are together at last—but will Ethan, now revolted by the sight of Katie Anne, ever realize that the woman he loves is inside his wife’s disfigured body? Graham’s body-switch gimmick is certainly a weird one, but her unabashed passion for cowboys, French wine, and all things romantic may win her an enthusiastic following. (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild Main selection; $400,000 ad/promo; author tour before publication)
Pub Date: July 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14404-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
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
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