A veritable factory of folk tales, author of more than 60 titles, continues his pre-Columbian history of the American Northeast. When last visited, Young Hunterancient hero of the Abenaki ("Only People"), a prehistoric Indian tribe introduced in Bruchac's Dawn Land (1993)had completed a quest to visit the Ancient Ones and save his people from disaster. Then he was only a boy; now, two years later, he has his majority and once again is burdened with a fatal task. He is also married and more fully empowered with higher mystical gifts than before, but Young Hunter is still fundamentally naive, relying on the wisdom of mysterious women, dreams, and the interpretation of natural signs. In this adventure, evil forest beings are threatening the Ancient Ones, thereby threatening the "Only People" as well. Young Hunter thus embarks again on a quest-like mission where the natural and supernatural are often hard to distinguish from one another. Bruchac flavors the story heavily with manufactured folklore, using names sometimes hard to remember through their veering either to the lyrical extreme or, conversely, the concrete (e.g., Blue Hawk, Angry Face), while descriptions are sometimes so abstract as to puzzle readers who wanting to know what, precisely, is going on. Annoyingly short chapters, meanwhile, create an episodic and sometimes tedious pacenot helped by a narrative tone that relies heavily on metaphor and assiduously avoids contractions, apparently in the belief that this is, somehow, how Indians think and talk. Bruchac seems to be caught between the creation of myth and the telling of a good story, aims sometimes complementary but sometimes not. Here, the attempt is often strained, resulting in a tale more than adequately told but far from inspiring.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55591-213-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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